Holtec will receive a $1.52 billion loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office to restart the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, the agency announced this week.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced the conditional commitment on Wednesday ahead of a tour of the Holtec Palisades Training Center in Covert, Mich. Granholm is visiting the Great Lakes region this week to promote investments in the region made by Congress at the behest of the administration of President Joe Biden (D).
The conditional commitment “demonstrates the Department’s intent to finance the project [but] the company must satisfy certain technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions before the Department enters into definitive financing documents and funds the loan,” DOE wrote in a press release emailed to the press on Wednesday morning.
According to a Holtec grant application obtained this year by an antinuclear group through a Freedom of Information Act request, the most expensive piece of new equipment the company needs to restart Palisades is a new steam generator that will cost about $510 million.
Meanwhile, Holtec also needs permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Permission to restart the single-reactor plant. The biggest regulatory hurdle at the NRC is reversing a modification to Palisades’ operating license that forbids refueling the reactor now that the facility has legally started decommissioning. Holtec has said that it has done no substantial decommissioning work at the site.
The NRC on March 18 said it could probably review a license amendment request to lift the prohibition on refueling by March 15, 2025, the date by which Holtec says it needs the amendment granted if it is to make its self-imposed deadline to restart Palisades by August 2025.
