Antinuclear activists on Wednesday sent a letter to the Michigan legislature urging state lawmakers not to approve a $300 million grant to help Holtec International restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station.
In a letter dated Wednesday and mailed to all 148 michigan lawmakers — 110 representatives and 38 senators — 79 people and 43 organizations opposed to restarting Palisades called the plant in Covert County, Mich., “uniquely bad” and told legislators to instead spread the $300 million grant Holtec seeks among public transit programs and training for technicians who could work on wind- and solar-power equipment.
The antis face stiff headwinds in Michigan, where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) supports a Palisades restart and has written to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in support of a federal loan for Holtec.
Holtec has said it is seeking the bulk of the funding it needs to restart Palisades, more than $1 billion, from the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office. DOE did not immediately respond to a query Wednesday about whether the office had issued Holtec a conditional loan statement: an early signal of pending approval that Holtec executives recently forecast could arrive in June or July.
The Michigan legislature likewise had not produced a bill as of Wednesday that would provide the state funding Holtec seeks. The company has said state lawmakers could approve a grant by July or so. The Michigan legislature was scheduled to be in session until the last week of December.
If Holtec gets the loans it needs this summer, the company has said it could begin in October the formal, bureaucratic work of convincing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to reauthorize power generation at Palisades.
Two-and-a-half years after that, the company has said, the plant could be producing electricity, assuming Holtec can secure a 20-year power purchase agreement from an entity that could also operate the plant.
Palisades’ license is set to expire in 2031.
Meanwhile, in parallel with its efforts to resuscitate the plant, Holtec is preparing to decommission Palisades, in case the largely unprecedented plan to bring the single-reactor facility back from the dead falls through.
When it bought Palisades in June 2022, Holtec estimated it would cost about $644 million to safely bring down the plant. Michigan’s attorney general had contested that figure, but Nuclear Commission Staff in May found that the price tag was reasonable.
To give the restart plan some breathing room, and to allow the plant’s decommissioning trust fund to collect interest, Holtec does not plan to begin decommissioning Palisades, if that becomes necessary, until the 2030s.
