SUMMERLIN, NEV — Holtec International is considering several companies as possible operators of the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, which the Florida-based decommissioning company hopes to restart, a company representative said here Thursday.
“We’ve been involved in conversations with a couple of different potential buyers for the power,” Patrick O’Brien, director of government affairs and communications at Holtec, said during a presentation here to the audience of the Exchange Monitor’s annual RadWaste 2.0 Summit. “We’re pretty far down the line, I think, in that.”
Citing nondisclosure agreements, O’Brien did not identify or characterize the potential buyers, or say whether any of these conversations were formal negotiations. He did tell the Monitor, on the sidelines of the summit, that Holtec is seeking a 20-year power purchase agreement. It could take that long for Holtec to pay back a large federal loan it’s seeking to help finance the plant’s reopening.
Palisades shut down in 2021 but Holtec, with the support of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and members of the state legislature, is embarking on what in the U.S. would be an unprecedented attempt to power it back up. Local government officials near the Covert Township plant overwhelmingly support its reopening.
Assuming everything goes to plan, and Holtec is able to complete a complicated regulatory dance with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Palisades could be up and running anywhere from a year-and-a-half to two years from whenever the company secures the funding and regulatory approvals it needs, O’Brien told the Monitor.
Holtec wants to fund the restart with a mixture of about $1.3 billion in federal and state funding, most of which, $1 billion or so, would come in the form of a loan from the Department of Energy. Michigan, Holtec hopes, will provide another $300 million.
O’Brien all but confirmed those figures, telling the audience here “I won’t dispute that those are the numbers.”
Holtec believes it will know by July whether the funding it wants from DOE and Michigan will come through, executives said in late May during a public meeting with the NRC.
If the restart gambit does not work, Holtec, which bought Palisades from Entergy to decommission it, will proceed in about three years with taking the plant down. Assuming it does not reopen, Palisades has to be fully decommissioned by 2082.
