Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff need until January 2025 to amend Holtec International’s license for the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, which the company wants to restart that August, commission staff said last week.
“With respect to your requested completion schedule of January 31, 2025, the NRC staff believes that it will complete the safety review by then,” reads a letter, posted online Tuesday but dated Jan. 23, to Jean Fleming, Holtec’s vice president of licensing and regulatory affairs, from NRC’s Justin Poole, project manager in the Plant Licensing Branch III at the Commission’s Division of Operating Reactor Licensing in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation.
Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., has a long line of regulatory hurdles to clear before the NRC can amend the company’s license, now only good for decommissioning the shuttered plant on the shores of Lake Michigan, to allow for power generation.
Aside from the license amendment request itself, which is subject to challenge at NRC and in federal courts, Holtec needs the commission to grant it an exemption to a commission rule that says a reactor that has been legally classified as undergoing decommissioning cannot be refueled.
Beyond the paperwork realm, Holtec has a mass of maintenance to do to get Palisades ready to pump power to the grid again. According to a grant application obtained by environmental groups through a freedom of information act, the plant needs a new steam generator, which at about $510 million is the single most expensive item on the Palisades punch list.
Palisades shut down in 2022 and Holtec bought the plant from Entergy to dismantle. Now, at the behest of local politicians, businesses and the governor of Michigan, the company is trying to restart the plant by August 2025.
Key to restarting the plant is a massive loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, for which the company applied in 2023 and which media this week, led by Bloomberg on Tuesday and seemingly confirmed by Reuters on Wednesday, reported that DOE was likely to grant by the end of February.
On Wednesday, a Holtec spokesperson said in an email that the company would not speculate on the timing of the loan application. In January, a company spokesperson in January said the company hoped it would receive a conditional commitment from the Loan Programs Office by the end of February.
Someone familiar with the thinking of people inside DOE’s Loan Programs Office said the office is definitely considering green-lighting the big loan for Holtec.
