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.
SMRs are central to meeting domestic decarbonization goals, said James Schaefer, a managing director with Guggenheim Partners, a Wall Street firm. There is no way to replace all the electricity generated from fossil fuels solely with solar, wind energy and battery storage, he said.
But deployment of mini-reactors could be hurt by factors ranging including risk-average electric utility bosses to slow regulatory approvals at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, various panelists said.
It took NuScale Power three-and-a-half years to win Nuclear Regulatory Commission design certification for technology that is “not new,” said Chuck Goodnight, vice president of sales for the company. NuScale uses pressurized water reactor technology for SMRs that can generate 50 megawatts of electricity each.
“Sailors in the Navy have been sleeping next to nuclear reactors on submarines for 70 years,” said Julie Kozeracki, a senior adviser with DOE’s loan program. Brownfield sites, such as closed nuclear stations and coal plants, are often good for SMRs because of the existing workforce and power lines, she said.
