The vice president of Holtec’s small modular reactor business is excited about the prospect of developing such units at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan.
“The details remain [to be worked out] as far as the exact timing and the financial conditions,” Tom Marcille, vice president and chief nuclear officer at Holtec International SMR, said during a webinar Tuesday by the United States Energy Association. “But essentially our aspiration is to build, own and operate those SMR [small modular reactor] power plants at Palisades.”
Marcille was one of a half-dozen panelists from the public and private sectors questioned by nuclear trade press reporters during the online session on the fledgling SMR industry.
Weeks ago, Holtec filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission seeking to reopen the shuttered Palisades plant, purchased from Entergy in 2022 for decommissioning. This week the antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear made public Holtec’s application for a $2-billion Department of Energy grant to help restart the plant.
Reviving the existing Palisades reactor with the incumbent site workforce, should dovetail with Holtec plans to develop and operate onsite SMRs, Marcille said. “We are open to all types of ownership and financing packages.”
“We are in competition with Russia and China,” in this emerging nuclear field, said the association’s president and CEO, Mark Menezes, who was deputy secretary of energy during the Donald Trump administration. Western alliance countries prefer not to depend on hostile nations for nuclear technology, Menezes and others said.
