Holtec International is creating a new subsidiary to switch back on the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan in less than two years, company executives told Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff Tuesday at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md.
The new operating company will eventually employ about 500 people, including more than 200 who are working on Palisades decommissioning now and who previously worked at the Calvert, Mich., plant before Entergy shut it down in 2022, Michael Schultheis Holtec’s manager of regulatory assurance for Palisades & Big Rock Point, said during the meeting.
Kelly Trice, Holtec’s president of nuclear generation and decommissioning, will lead the planned Palisades operating company as president. Richard Burroni, former site vice president of the Indian Point Nuclear Energy Center in New York, now another Holtec decommissioning site, would be the new company’s chief nuclear officer.
Holtec included a diagram of its proposed new corporate structure, and the names of more senior leaders for the planned Palisades operating company, in the slides the company presented to NRC staff at Tuesday’s meeting.
To restart Palisades, Holtec will need a slew of regulatory approvals from the NRC and a barge of cash from the Department of Energy. In 2024, the company plans to submit what executives on Tuesday called a large package of regulatory requests to the commission.
An NRC staffer on Tuesday said Holtec was once again in uncharted waters.
“I’m having a hard time thinking of an example that looks anything like what you all are doing,” Biran Green, NRC’s acting branch chief for enterprise applications and platform services, said at the meeting. Green said there is probably a “path to success” for Holtec, but that what the company proposes will be a “trickier review” than anything the commission has done before.
Holtec and the NRC have each acknowledged the effort to restart Palisades is essentially unprecedented in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry.
The biggest regulatory hurdle, Holtec has said, is getting a one-time exemption to the NRC regulation that forbids putting nuclear fuel into empty reactors that have legally started decommissioning. The process has never been reversed in NRC history.
Environmental reviews may also delay the restart of Palisades. An NRC staffer said in September, during another public meeting about the proposed restart, that Holtec may not be able to glide through its environmental obligations as smoothly as the company hopes.
Beyond the regulatory realm, Holtec also says it needs a loan of more than $1 billion from the Department of Energy’s loan program office. As of Tuesday, DOE had not announced whether it would grant that loan, which the Secretary of Energy, currently a former Michigan governor, must personally approve.
In early September, a Holtec spokesperson said the company hoped DOE would make a decision about the loan before December. In May, Holtec told NRC staff that DOE could make a conditional commitment by July and finalize the loan by October.
Meanwhile, Holtec has checked one major item of its to-do list for a Palisades restart. The company in September announced that an electric cooperative had agreed to buy the power Palisades would generate if the plant comes back online.
If everything breaks Holtec’s way, the company thinks Palisades could start sending electricity to the grid in August 2025.
