The Department of Energy is still considering how and whether it will help bail out a shuttered power plant in Michigan, a senior agency official testified Tuesday in Congress.
Plant owner Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., seeks a roughly $1 billion loan for DOE and said this spring that the federal agency could conditionally approve the company’s loan application in July.
But as of Tuesday, DOE was “still assessing, I guess, what can be done, as far as different options,” said Michael Goff, principal deputy assistant secretary of DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate, and grid security subcommittee.
Goff was replying to a question from Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), who subsequently told the DOE official to “[a]ssess well, assess efficiently and don’t waste any time.”
At the Exchange Monitor’s RadWaste Summit in June, a Holtec executive said the company could pay back DOE’s loan with the proceeds of a roughly 20-year power purchase agreement that it hopes to secure from an entity capable of operating the Palisades plant over the long haul.
The federal loan Holtec seeks could also give the company access to $150 million in financial aid the Michigan legislature approved in a bill passed in late June, and which as of Tuesday awaited Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) signature. That’s about half of what Holtec has said it needs from the state.
DOE offers loan guarantees for nuclear power under a program authorized by the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Those loans are supposed to “eliminate gaps in commercial financing for energy projects in the United States that utilize innovative technology to reduce, avoid, or sequester greenhouse gas emissions,” according to DOE.
Palisades could be up and running again anywhere from a year-and-a-half to two years after Holtec gets the money it says it needs to restart the plant, the company has said.
Aside from securing the big federal loan and doing maintenance, repairs and refueling at Palisades, Holtec will need to complete a complicated, unprecedented application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to get the plant restarted.
Palisades’ NRC license, which is set to expire in 2031, currently permits only decommissioning of the plant, not operations. No U.S. plant has gotten operations tacked back onto a license after moving into decommissioning.
