The shuttered Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan could restart in about two years, plant owner Holtec International told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in a public meeting Tuesday.
The date will depend among other things on whether Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., can get a billion-dollar loan from the Department of Energy, but it may also depend on whether the company, which bought the plant from Entergy in 2022 to decommission it, has more regulatory hurdles to clear than it believes.
In a public meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., Kenneth Erwin from the commission’s staff pushed back on Holtec’s belief that two existing environmental reviews of the 52 year-old Palisades Plant do not need to be updated. One of these reviews was published in 1972 and supplemented in 1978. The other was published in 2006.
Jim Miksa, Holtec’s regulatory assurance engineer for Palisades, told NRC staff on Tuesday that the company essentially plans to put the plant back the way it was before it shut down a little more than a year ago.
Because Palisades would be “restored to a previously analyzed state” its environmental paperwork would require only an “administrative review,” Miksa said.
Erwin, chief of NRC’s Environmental Review Branch for New Reactors, was not so sure.
“It’s not really administrative in nature to bring the plant back online,” said Erwin, manager of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. “You’ve got a lot of issues that can change over time.
Erwin said a restart might affect climate change, environmental justice and endangered species near the plant that had not lived there previously.
“To me, that takes it out of a purely administrative type of review,” Erwin said. “Just some feedback.”
Miksa said Tuesday that Holtec has hired an “independent firm,” which he did not identify, to double-check the company’s conclusions. Holtec hopes this review, which Miksa said was ongoing as of Tuesday, will bolster its case that the existing, decades-old environmental reviews of Palisades need not be revisited.
Assuming Palisades does not need a fresh environmental review, Holtec’s biggest regulatory hurdle at the NRC will be securing a one-time exemption to a portion of Title 10, section 50.82 of the Code of Federal Regulations that prohibits power generation or even the loading of fuel at a nuclear power plant that is being decommissioned.
In regulatory terms, Holtec plans to ask NRC for a “a one-time recission of the docketed certifications for permanent cessation of operations and permanent removal of fuel from the reactor vessel to remove,” according to slides the company briefed to NRC staff on Tuesday.
Whatever happens on the regulatory front, Holtec faces another, potentially larger hurdle to restarting Palisades: securing a $1.3-billion loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. Michigan in July approved $150 million in state aid for restarting Palisades but Holtec cannot tap into that funding unless it gets a loan from DOE first.
And evidently, the federal agency is not moving as swiftly as the company hoped.
Holtec is now “[h]oping to hear by year end” whether DOE will approve the loan, a company spokesperson wrote in an email to the Exchange Monitor on Tuesday after the meeting at NRC headquarters.
In May, during another meeting with NRC staff, Holtec executives said they might receive a conditional commitment from DOE by July and a finalized loan by October.
As of Tuesday, Palisades was not among the DOE Loan Programs Office’s active conditional commitments, according to a website maintained by the office. The secretary of energy has to approve such loans.
At least four members of the DOE Loan Programs Office attended Tuesday’s meeting between NRC staff and Holtec. Among the DOE personnel in attendance was Thomas Pollog, who has led the nuclear team at the office’s Technical and Project Management Division.
