Executives with Holtec’s decommissioning arm were scheduled to meet Tuesday with Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff to continue a discussion about potentially restarting the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station.
The meeting at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., was to begin at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time and run until 3:00 p.m. Eastern time, according to a notice the commission posted online. Members of the public can watch the meeting online on the NRC’s website.
Since August, when Holtec last met with NRC staff, the company has secured a buyer for the electricity that Palisades would generate, if the plant is technically capable of restarting and the commission agrees to give Holtec permission to fire up the reactor again. The company said it needs a one-time exemption to an NRC regulation that prohibits power generation at a plant that has legally entered decommissioning, as Palisades has.
Holtec has also said it cannot restart Palisades without a loan of more than $1 billion from the Department of Energy. As of Tuesday morning, DOE had not said whether it would grant the loan.
Restarting a shuttered commercial nuclear power plant would be essentially unprecedented in U.S. history, the NRC has said.
