Environmentalists have no right to a hearing over Holtec International’s plans to restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, but they might soon, Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff said Friday.
Palisades shut down in 2022 but Holtec, which bought the plant from Entergy to decommission, is now trying to restart it. The company needs a big loan from the Department of Energy, but also regulatory relief from the NRC.
To delay NRC’s consideration of the first round of relief the company wants, three environmental groups asked for a hearing over Holtec’s request for an exemption from a regulation that forbids refueling a reactor that has legally transitioned to decommissioning.
But the law “does not provide a hearing opportunity on an exemption request,” NRC staff wrote Friday in a reply to the environmentalists’ Dec. 5 hearing request.
However, Holtec will need other forms of regulatory relief, including amendments to its NRC license for Palisades and an eventual license transfer request to the future Palisades operator, assuming the plant restarts as planned.
“To the extent that the transfer and amendment requests are submitted and accepted for review, the Staff would publish Federal Register notices providing an opportunity for hearing on those requests,” commission staff wrote in their Friday filing.
Holtec wants to restart Palisades by August 2025, the company has said. This summer, the state of Michigan pitched in $150 million to help Holtec repair the plant, but that is only a fraction of the price tag of the restart.
Holtec seeks $1 billion or more from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office. The company had hoped the loan would get approved by Dec. 31. As of Sunday, DOE had not announced whether it had approved or denied Holtec’s loan application.
