Holtec International planned to meet with Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff Aug. 29 to discuss what the company says is the biggest regulatory hurdle to restarting the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station.
The commission posted a notice of the meeting online Tuesday. Executives with Holtec International will join members of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation and Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards at agency headquarters in Rockville, Md., near Washington. Those who wish to watch the meeting online must register in advance.
The planned August meeting is a follow-up of sorts to Holtec’s May visit with commission staff at NRC headquarters, when the company said it would need an exemption to the agency regulation that forbids generating electricity at a nuclear power plant following the defueling of its reactor.
Holtec told NRC staff then that an exemption to this regulation, Title 10, section 50.82 of the Code of Federal Regulations, was “absolutely critical” to restarting Palisades, which Holtec purchased in 2022 from Entergy. The company has slow-rolled its decommissioning of the plant ever since as it angles for state and federal funding to finance the maintenance and regulatory compliance required for what would be an essentially unprecedented effort in the U.S.
Holtec has effectively said that it needs a total of $1.3 billion for the Palisades restart: $1 billion from the Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs and $300 million from Michigan.
Michigan last week approved $150 million in aid for Holtec, but that funding is contingent on DOE delivering the big loan.
A DOE spokesperson on Wednesday declined to comment about Holtec’s loan application.
“We cannot confirm or deny the identity of an applicant or existence of an application/provide application details as we consider that business confidential information,” the DOE spokesperson wrote in an email to the Exchange Monitor.
During its meeting with NRC staff in May, Holtec said DOE might conditionally approve the loan by July. The Secretary of Energy has to approve a conditional commitment from the loan programs office, and just getting to a conditional commitment can take about a year, according to the Loan Programs Office’s website.
