Holtec Decommissioning International this week pitched the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on restarting the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan via a license amendment request, according to company documents posted online Monday.
It was the first time the company, which wants to find a buyer to reopen and operate Palisades if suitable federal subsidies can be found, revealed any part of its strategy for navigating uncharted regulatory waters that would require the NRC to restore an operating license to a plant that has stopped generating power and removed all the fuel from its reactor.
According to slides and a letter uploaded to NRC’s website, Holtec and NRC officials were to meet Monday to discuss a possible Palisades restart.
A combination of a license amendment request and one-time exemptions from NRC regulations “provides adequate flexibility to accommodate reauthorization of power operations,” Holtec wrote in its presentation to the commission.
Holtec in February applied for a federal loan to help pay for the Covert, Mich., plant’s restart. That same month, in a heavily redacted letter posted online by NRC, Holtec revealed that it had a regulatory plan for restarting Palisades.
The company previously tried to get some of the Civilian Nuclear Credits the Department of Energy has made available as part of the 2022 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, but the agency nixed the company’s application.
Palisades shut down in May 2022, which appeared to make the plant eligible for a round of the $6 billion worth of Civilian Nuclear Credits from last year’s big infrastructure bill. Holtec, however, decided that a DOE loan under a program authorized in 2005 was a better fit for the proposed Palisades restart, which Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) supports.
