The company that was to decommission the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Michigan inappropriately withdrew more than $160 million from the plant’s decommissioning trust fund and did not pay it back, environmental and anti-nuclear activists said Wednesday in a meeting with NRC staff.
The activists said Wednesday that they had identified in public reports filed with the NRC another $120 million that was taken out of the Palisades decommissioning fund and neither used to dismantle the plant nor put back in the fund. That is on top of $44 million the activists claimed in December was missing without explanation from the fund.
Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., wants to restart Palisades by Aug. 2025 and in March scored a conditional loan commitment from the Department of Energy for $1.5 billion to help restart the plant.
“Holtec is committed to providing evidence of sufficient decommissioning funding prior to a return to power operations,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement emailed to the Exchange Monitor on Wednesday. “If at any point in the future Holtec cannot demonstrate fund sufficiency to cover then-applicable funding obligations, Holtec Palisades will provide additional funding assurance as required by NRC regulations.”
Holtec has said repeatedly, including in a Feb. 9 license amendment request filed with the NRC, that “[n]o major decommissioning activities occurred” at Palisades since the company bought the plant from Entergy in 2022. Originally, Holtec was to decommission and dismantle Palisades, but local, state and now federal interests have worked to keep the single-reactor facility open.
Holtec has done some “early-stage decommissioning activities” at Palisades that are “separate from those supporting the repower, the company spokesperson said Wednesday.
The groups petitioning NRC for an enforcement action against Holtec under the agency’s 2.206 process, under which anyone may ask the agency to review and possibly punish an NRC license holder, are:
- Beyond Nuclear
- Michigan Safe Energy Future
- Don’t Waste Michigan
The activists, in a press release this week, said they face a stacked deck at the NRC.
“By one count of emergency enforcement petition attempts, only one-half of one-percent prevailed,” the activists wrote Tuesday in a joint press release. “One description of NRC’s 2.206 process is a black hole, from which petitioners are never heard from again, by design.”
NRC staff should decide “relatively soon” whether to accept the petition, a commission spokesperson wrote Wednesday afternoon in the email. If staff do accept the petition, it could take about 120 days for them to rule one way or another and produce what is known as a director’s decision from the NRC’s executive director of operations, the agency’s top civil servant, then another 45 days to finalize that recommendation.
But that timetable is “fluid,” the spokesperson said.
If there is a director’s decision, NRC commissioners would get 25 days to review the decision or let it stand.
