Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff need a little less than a year to review a request for a license amendment Holtec needs to restart Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, according to a letter published Tuesday.
“With respect to your requested completion schedule of March 15, 2025, the NRC staff believes that it will complete the safety review by then,” reads the letter to Jean Fleming, Holtec’s vice president of licensing and regulatory affairs from Justin Poole, NRC project manager for Plant Licensing Branch III in the Division of Operating Reactor Licensing in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
The letter was dated March 18 and published online by NRC on Tuesday. Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., wants to restart Palisades in August 2025. To do that, the company needs the NRC to amend the plant’s operating license to remove a clause that forbids refueling of the reactor.
The clause is a standard addition to any operating license for a plant that has moved into the decommissioning phase of its life. Removing the clause would be an unprecedented action for the NRC, but it would not be the only NRC action required for the restart.
When it applied for this particular license amendment in February, Holtec repeated what it has said since the state of Michigan and Covert, Mich., locals agreed to attempt to reopen the plant: that the Jupiter, Fla., company had done “[n]o major decommissioning activities” at Palisades.
Though getting permission to reload the Palisades reactor is the biggest regulatory hurdle standing in the way of a Palisades restart, there are others. These include multiple “future requests for license amendments” aside from the one NRC corresponded with Holtec about on the 18th, according to Poole’s letter
Taken together, all the looming license amendment requests might prompt the NRC to conduct new environmental reviews of the Palisades site to see what effects a plant restart could have on the shores of Lake Michigan, the lake itself, and wildlife around the plant, Poole wrote.
Meanwhile, the biggest barrier to a Palisades restart could be financial.
Holtec needs somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion to pay for major equipment maintenance and replacement at Palisades, including $510 million for a new steam generator, according to a grant application obtained this year by an antinuclear group through a Freedom of Information Act request. The company is seeking the money from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.
In a Tuesday press release, Beyond Nuclear, the group behind the Freedom of Information Act request, said that Secretary of Energy Granholm on Wednesday “will tour the Palisades nuclear power plant” and “will announce a $1.5 billion U.S. Department of Energy “bridge” loan guarantee for Holtec, towards the unprecedented restart of the closed reactor.”
Granholm this week traveled to the Midwest, stopping in Ohio before arriving Tuesday in Michigan, according to posts on the website X from multiple U.S. government accounts.
