The company in charge of a Michigan nuclear plant scheduled to close this summer doesn’t have any plans to keep the facility running despite the state government’s aims to save it, a spokesperson said this week.
Entergy, which currently owns Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, “acknowledge[s] having recently been contacted by government officials about the facility potentially operating beyond May 2022,” a spokesperson for the company told RadWaste Monitor via email Thursday. The spokesperson declined to comment further on that outreach.
Palisades is slated to go offline for good in May. Entergy has already agreed to sell the plant to Holtec International — a transaction which the decommissioning company has said could be finalized by as soon as June.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said last week that Lansing would submit a bid to the Department of Energy for a shot at roughly $6 billion in federal funds set aside by the agency to bail out economically-troubled nuclear plants. DOE formally unveiled the program April 19 and said that the first checks should go out to qualifying plants by October. The funding was part of November’s bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Entergy will “continue to entertain discussions with qualified nuclear merchant plant owner/operators who may want to purchase and continue operating Palisades,” the spokesperson said. “However, it is important to note that no formal proposal to acquire Palisades has been made that provides an opportunity for continued operations and that eliminates the substantial financial and operational risks associated with unwinding the existing contract with Holtec.”
During an earnings call with investors Wednesday, Entergy CEO Leo Denault also poured cold water on the prospect of a Palisades revival. “The plant will have to stop operating in May, because we’ll be out of fuel,” Denault said. “There’s a lot of work that will need to be done at the plant to prepare it to operate beyond that cycle, and we really haven’t done any investigation into what that work would be, because we’ve been planning for five years to shut the plant down.”
Keeping Palisades online in hopes of future federal assistance would be tough, Denault said.
“We couldn’t be more supportive of the fact that continued operations of the country’s nuclear fleet are important,” Denault said. “I’m encouraged by what DOE’s got going on for future plants, but at this stage with Palisades it’s just a really heavy lift.”
Meanwhile, Entergy’s nuclear woes continued in its first quarter earnings report. Entergy Wholesale Commodities, which encompasses the company’s nuclear energy business, pulled in only about $7 million in income, or 4 cents per share, for the first quarter of 2022 ended March 31, according to 8-K documents filed by the company Wednesday.
That’s a year-over-year drop of more than 80% compared with roughly $38 million, or 19 cents per share, for the 2021 quarter. Revenue was around $150 million, down 40% year-over-year from around $248 million.
The nuclear segment’s earnings nosedive was due in part to lower revenue “primarily” related to the April closure of Indian Point Energy Center’s Unit 3 reactor in New York, Entergy said. The plant’s sale to Holtec International also did away with earnings from the Indian Point nuclear decommissioning trust fund.
Company-wide, Entergy posted an income of around $269 million, or $1.36 per share, for the first quarter of 2022, down around 20% from $335 million, or $1.66 per share, during the same period last year. Total revenue for the first quarter was about flat at around $2.8 million.
