Although a Michigan nuclear power plant shut down earlier than expected, capacity losses from nuclear generation outages were lower this summer than they were the year prior, the government’s independent energy auditor said in a report last week.
Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, which shut down May 20, removed around 770 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from the national grid when it went offline, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in a report on nuclear plant outages published Oct. 14. EIA said that it considered Palisades’s closure an “unplanned outage” in its survey.
Despite that decline in generation, the daily average capacity loss this summer was around 2.5 GW, the report said. That figure represents a decline of about 19% from the 3.1 GW average in summer 2021.
Including Palisades, there have been 22 unplanned nuclear outages this year, EIA said, a decline from 51 around the same time in 2021. Unplanned outages can include early retirements, equipment failure or inclement weather, whereas planned outages are often used to refuel nuclear power plants.
Although the Palisades plant is currently offline, efforts are underway to bring the facility back online. Nuclear decommissioning company Holtec International, which purchased the plant in June, has said that it applied with the Department of Energy for a federal bailout under the agency’s civil nuclear credits program.
Holtec, which initially took over at Palisades with plans to decommission the site, told the Exchange Monitor in September that it would use a potential federal bailout to work with the state of Michigan, the federal government and “a yet to be identified third-party operator to see if this is a viable option.”
As of Tuesday, DOE had yet to announce the awardees for its first round of funding under the civil nuclear credits program.
