A A consultant with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy said Thursday that cleaning up a too-salty underground plume stemming from FPL’s nuclear plant near Homestead will take at least 60 years.

Florida Power & Light’s cleanup of polluted water seeping from its Turkey Point nuclear plant’s cooling canals will take more than 60 years, not five or 10 years as the company has stated, a hydrologist said Thursday.

Customers of Juno Beach-based FPL are paying $200 million to draw back a plume that is saltier than seawater that is contaminating the Biscayne Aquifer. The aquifer is the sole source of

The underground plume has spread 5 miles west of the two-reactor plant that overlooks Biscayne Bay about 25 miles south of Miami and also is contaminating Biscayne National Park.

William Nuttle, a consultant for advocacy group The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said that FPL is pumping 14 million gallons a day from beneath the cooling canals, but that 9 million gallons a day continues leaking from the canals. The net recovery is 4 million to 5 million gallons a day.

Pumping for 10 years will remove 54 billion gallons from the plume, but over the same time, seepage from the canals will add 33 billion gallons to the aquifer, Nuttle said. The net result is that the plume’s volume will decrease by 21 billion gallons — or about 15 percent — Nuttle said.

FPL spokeswoman Bianca Cruz said in a statement, “FPL’s plan for the Recovery Well System was developed using the most sophisticated groundwater model ever developed in the region, and was subsequently approved by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the South Florida Water Management District and Miami-Dade County.

“This model is informed by expert hydro-geologists using more than 35 million data points that have been collected since 2010. The groundwater model indicates that the recovery well system will work, and it will work within 10 years.

FPL began the remediation in 2016.

SACE, Tropical Audubon Society and Friends of the Everglades have an ongoing federal Clean Water Act lawsuit against FPL over discharges from the plant.

SACE has long advocated for the plant’s 2-mile-by-5 miles unlined canal system to be replaced with cooling towers. Stephen Smith, SACE’s executive director, said the cooling canal system is the only one of its kind in the world, and it has been failing for decades.

Nuttle’s calculations come at a crucial time, as the Miami-Dade County Commission is set to vote April 10 on an agreement with FPL. The agreement calls for tens of millions of gallons of treated municipal waste water to be added to Turkey Point’s canal system every day.

“To assure success, FPL must look for ways to reduce seepage out of the cooling canals, not increase it. These new inputs of reuse water will decrease the effectiveness of remediation,” Nuttle said.

Diverting the water to the canal system would solve the problem of what to do with treated sewage Miami-Dade County now sends into the ocean. State law requires southeast Florida utilities to eliminate the normal use of ocean outfalls by the end of 2025, except under certain defined conditions.