Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff will review environmentalists’ claims that Holtec Decommissioning International illegally paid for the upkeep of Michigan’s Palisades Nuclear Plant with funds intended to pay for the plant’s teardown, the commission said this week.
The NRC the referred groups’ “concerns that Holtec has misused the decommissioning trust fund to the Executive Director for Operations for consideration,” according to an order published online Tuesday and dated Monday.
The Commission’s Tuesday decision is a partial victory for the environmental groups Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, and Michigan Safe Energy Future, who in a Dec. 5 filing with the NRC said that “Holtec has misused the [Palisades] decommissioning trust fund to keep Palisades in a status to restart the reactor, rather than to decommission the plant.”
That accusation, which Holtec did not address in its Dec. 11 response to the groups’ petition, was only part of the environmental groups’ petition earlier this month. The groups’ larger goal was to get a hearing about Holtec’s request for an exemption to an NRC rule that forbids refueling a reactor that has legally transitioned to decommissioning.
The commission shot down the hearing request in its Monday order, writing that federal law does not give the public the right to ask for a hearing about an exemption request if the exemption is not part of NRC deliberations about a license. However, the commission said that the groups may get a chance to ask for a hearing when Holtec’s attempt to restart Palisades gets further along.
Holtec bought Palisades from Entergy in 2022 to decommission the plant, but Michigan’s state government eventually endorsed reopening the single-reactor facility on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Holtec is still seeking $1 billion or more in financial aid from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. The company is banking on the federal aid to pay for needed upgrades at Palisades, which in the years leading up to its sale had not been preparing to operate beyond 2022.
