Holtec Decommissioning International wants the state of Michigan to provide $300 million to restart the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, a state lawmaker confirmed Tuesday.
State Rep. Pauline Wendzel (R), first reported as one of two sources of the information by the local Herald-Palladium, confirmed the figure in an email Tuesday to the Exchange Monitor. State Rep. Joey Andrews (D), the other source in the Herald-Palladium’s story, did not reply to a request for comment.
“I assume they’ll request an appropriation from the Legislature unless they have another route they’re seeking,” Wendzel wrote in her email.
A “financial commitment from Michigan and a power purchase agreement are both essential to making a return to operations feasible,” a Holtec spokesperson wrote in an email on Tuesday.
Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., in February applied for a Department of Energy loan, under a program authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, to restart Palisades, which shut down in May 2022.
The Holtec spokesperson said Tuesday the company continued to “work with the Department of Energy through the loan application process.”
The 39th state House of Representatives district that Wendzel represents is about 35 miles west by road from Kalamazoo, Mich., near the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan and close to Covert, Mich., home of the Palisades plant. The waterfront 38th district Andrews represents includes the plant itself and is immediately west of the district Wendzel represents.
Holec’s DOE loan application is the company’s second attempt in as many years to secure federal funding to reopen the plant, in Covert, Mich., which Holtec bought from Entergy in June 2022. Entergy agreed to sell to Holtec in 2018.
In 2022, DOE turned down Holtec’s application for a share of the $6-billion Congress approved to bail out financially struggling nuclear power plants as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Diablo Canyon in Avila Beach, Calif., got the award instead, clinching essentially all of the funding, about $1 billion, available in the first year of the five-year bailout program.
Diablo Canyon’s operator, Pacific Gas & Electric, also got a significant bailout from California: more than $1 billion.
After Diablo Canyon walked away with the federal bailout plan’s first award, DOE published rules for the second round of the bailout that appeared to qualify Palisades to apply. However, the company decided to apply for a loan instead.
Meanwhile, Holtec has been working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the regulatory options for restarting the shuttered Palisades reactor, something essentially unprecedented in the agency’s history.
