The most expensive item needed to restart the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is a new steam generator that will cost half a billion dollars, according to a federal grant application from Holtec International obtained by an antinuclear group and distributed Monday to the media.
The Washington-based group Beyond Nuclear obtained Holtec’s 42-page application for the Department of Energy’s Civilian Nuclear Credit program through a Freedom of Information Act request. Holtec filed the grant application in 2022, seeking roughly $2 billion from the agency.
DOE denied the application and Holtec has since pivoted to seeking funding from the agency’s Loan Programs Office. The company has not been publicly clear about how large a loan it applied for, but a spokesperson has repeatedly declined to deny that the company seeks at least $1 billion.
The application also details many of the costs Holtec expects to incur in its drive to restart the plant on the shores of Lake Michigan that the Jupiter, Fla., company bought from Entergy in 2022 with the intent of decommissioning.
A new steam generator is the single-largest line item on a table of expenses Holtec laid out in its grant application with DOE. The generator, where the plant turns water into steam that drives electricity-producing turbines, will cost about $510 million, according to Holtec’s loan application.
No other single line item comes close to that, with labor a distant second at about $230 million, according to the application. Holtec put the cost of complying with Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules at about $45 million and the cost of a “partner utility management contract” at about $28 million, according to the application.
The application was one of several documents DOE returned to Beyond Nuclear in response to the group’s FOIA request.
In October, Holtec filed the first of many expected regulatory requests with the NRC necessary to restart Palisades. In September, the company announced that it had signed a power purchase agreement with a rural electric cooperative that would buy any electricity Palisades generates if it comes back online.
If the DOE loan and the NRC regulatory requests work out, Palisades could switch back on by August 2025, the company has said. A Holtec spokesperson has said the company hopes DOE will make a decision on a loan by Dec. 31.
Editor’s note, 12/12/2023, 1:23 p.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to clarify Holtec’s characterization of size of the loan it seeks from the Department of Energy.
