The Department of Energy could begin doling out the first installments of credits for financially-troubled nuclear power plants this summer, the agency’s nuclear fuel cycle chief said Monday.
Mid-June “is the best estimate we can offer” on when DOE’s initial payments could go out, said Andrew Griffith, the Office of Nuclear Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for the nuclear fuel cycle and supply chain, during a public Q&A session Monday.
Griffith said the date depends on the input DOE receives from an ongoing request for information (RFI) the agency unveiled Feb. 15 and how it “translate[s] that into the guidance document and the process to follow” for auctioning off $6 billion worth of credits.
However, Kelly Lefler, a senior advisor at DOE, said Monday that she was “not comfortable” making such a prediction. “We are going to work as quickly as we can, recognizing the urgency of the situation,” Lefler said, “but we need the information from the RFI, and we have to make sure that we think this through and do it effectively and transparently.”
DOE said in a December blog post that it had planned to issue the first round of credits this fall. An agency spokesperson didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
President Joe Biden in November signed into law the roughly $6 billion in tax credits for nuclear plant operators as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the bipartisan infrastructure bill. The law gives DOE until April to work out its process for auctioning off the nuclear credits.
As part of the procedure outlined in DOE’s information request, the agency proposed a list of criteria for qualifying operators. It also suggested allocating credits over a four-year period, at $1.2 billion per year, to be doled out to applicants by a review panel made up of DOE personnel. March 17 is the deadline for interested parties to comment on the RFI.
In the meantime, nuclear power plants are still shutting down. Michigan’s Palisades plant is next up, due for closure in May. In 2021, only one of three planned shutdowns actually happened when Indian Point in New York went offline in April. Two other plants, Byron and Dresden in Illinois, were saved in September by a roughly $700 million state bailout.
