The company aiming to purchase a Michigan nuclear power plant won’t expedite the process even though the site went offline earlier than expected, a spokesperson said this week.
Although Palisades Nuclear Generating Station shut down Friday, around 11 days earlier than its scheduled May 31 closure date, Holtec International has “no plans” to finalize the plant’s sale early, a company spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via email Monday. “The original schedule of late June is still the plan,” the spokesperson said.
Plant operator Entergy said in a press release last week that Holtec would take control of the facility once it has been safely defueled. Palisades staff made the “conservative” decision to bring the plant offline May 20 “due to the performance of a control rod drive seal,” Entergy said.
“The final shut down marks the end of more than 50 successful years of safe, secure, and reliable generation of clean, carbon-free electricity at Palisades,” the company said.
If the Covert, Mich., plant’s sale is finalized in June, Holtec will have a total of four decommissioning projects under its belt. The company is currently working at New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts and Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey.
As Holtec prepares to make the Palisades sale final, Michigan’s attorney general and a cadre of anti-nuclear groups led by Beyond Nuclear are waiting on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to decide whether to hold a public hearing on the transaction. The commission approved the transaction in December.
Holtec in January told NRC that it had dissolved for convenience Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI), its joint venture with Canadian nuclear services company SNC-Lavalin. CDI, formed in 2018, was the primary contractor for decommissioning Palisades. Holtec has said that it would absorb the joint venture’s assets.
Holtec’s cooperation with SNC-Lavalin was one issue in Beyond Nuclear’s February 2021 hearing request. The anti-nuclear group raised concerns about the company’s 2013 debarment by the World Bank following misconduct related to a construction project in Bangladesh. Despite the 10-year duration of the sanctions, the international monetary body in 2021 lifted them early, citing compliance with the debarment agreement.
Meanwhile, Entergy told the RadWaste Monitor in April that more than a third, or around 260, of the plant’s 594 employees would stay on with Holtec for decommissioning. Of the 334 workers not staying on, around 130 are transitioning to other roles with the company. About another 180 employees will leave, Entergy said. Around half of those were eligible for retirement, according to the company.
Palisades’ early shutdown comes after Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said in April that she would try to get Entergy to apply for a federal bailout as part of the Department of Energy’s roughly $6 billion nuclear credits program. The company said at the time that it had been contacted by Lansing about submitting a bid to DOE as part of its first awards cycle, but that no formal plan had been put together and that it would be difficult to alter course from the long-planned shutdown, set in motion about five years ago.
DOE last week extended the deadline for bids on its first round of nuclear credits to July 5 from May 19. The agency said that it had received a request to push the date back, but declined to say who had asked.
