Summer approval for Palisades restart ‘demanding,’ NRC staff say

Approving the restart of a Michigan nuclear plant by August will be “demanding,” federal regulators said Tuesday, and there is more work ahead than the plant’s owner may realize.

That was the takeaway from senior Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff during their hybrid public meeting at commission headquarters in Rockville, Md., with Holtec International, owner of the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert County, Mich., and Framatome, the company’s partner in the plant’s planned restart.

Summarizing concerns from two members of his staff, and adding his own, Steven Bloom, chief of the NRC’s subsequent license renewal branch, told Holtec and Framatome that the companies should be as specific as possible when they submit license amendment requests necessary for the federal government to approve the unprecedented restart of Palisades, which shut down in 2022.

“We need everything you’ve got from the very beginning,” Bloom said during a public meeting about license amendment requests Holtec plans to file in connection with the plant’s steam generators. The meeting was broadcast online by NRC.

Holtec has asked the NRC to give some of the necessary regulatory approvals to restart Palisades by August, but that will be “very demanding,” Eric Reichelt, senior materials engineer, said at the meeting.

There are “very few” people at NRC working on the restart and so “[t]he more information that you have in the [license amendment request] for this topic, the better the review time for us.”

On top of that, Bloom said, NRC staff are interested in seeing for themselves the materials tests that Holtec and Framatome have been doing. Holtec has known for years that Palisades would need expensive new steam generators ahead of the restart. Antinuclear groups and activists, including an ex-employee of former Palisades operator Entergy, have keyed in on the aging steam generators and associated systems as potential obstacles to a restart.

“We may need to go visit Framatome and go visit the sites” and see the testing “and that all is going to add to the schedule, which is already very aggressive,” Bloom said Tuesday.

In slides prepared for Tuesday’s meeting, Holtec again said it could restart Palisades as soon as September, assuming NRC first approves the various license amendment requests required to do so.

“We understand we’re asking for a very aggressive” review, Jean Fleming, Holtec’s vice president of licensing and regulatory assurance said Tuesday at the hybrid meeting. “We understand that”