One of two economically-troubled Illinois nuclear power plants bailed out by the state government last month has completed its refueling process, the plant’s operator said this week.
Byron Nuclear Generating Station “completed its refueling outage earlier this month,” a spokesperson for Exelon Generation told RadWaste Monitor via email Wednesday afternoon. The Ogle County, Ill. nuclear plant is back online thanks to a roughly $700 million cash injection signed into law by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) Sep. 15., a move praised by industry and government alike.
Exelon said at the time that it would immediately begin refueling both the Byron plant and Dresden Nuclear Generating Station in Morris, Ill — both of which had been on the chopping block before the eleventh-hour bailouts.
An Exelon spokesperson told the Monitor Wednesday that Dresden should be refueled in November.
Meanwhile, Exelon is getting its regulatory affairs in order as Byron and Dresden get a new lease on life. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission Oct. 1 allowed the company to walk back a pair of license amendments that would have altered procedures for plant administration and updated emergency plans for the sites’ spent fuel storage pads.
Byron and Dresden’s second wind is a rare success story for an industry in which nuclear power plants are coming down much, much faster than they’re being built. Michigan’s Palisades plant is slated to close early next year, and Indian Point Nuclear Generating Station in New York finally shut down for good April 30.
The Joe Biden administration has proposed around $6 billion or so in federal tax credits to keep the lights on at nuclear plants nationwide as part of its multi-trillion dollar infrastructure bill — currently the subject of fierce intra-party debate in Congress.
