Holtec International will know by June or July whether it will get the funds it wants to restart the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Calvert, Mich., executives told Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff Wednesday.
It was the most specific public timetable Holtec has set yet for the full-court fundraising press the company initiated to restart Palisades’ reactor, which shut down almost exactly a year ago, in May 2022.
The executives spoke during a public meeting webcast from NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md. Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., made the trip to the Washington area to describe in more detail its strategy for what would be an unprecedented restart of a power-generating reactor in the U.S.
Holtec is in “active discussions” with federal and state agencies from which the company seeks funding for the restart, Jean Fleming, the company’s vice president of licensing, regulatory and probabilistic safety analysis, said during Wednesday’s meeting.
Holtec seeks a loan from the U.S. Department of Energy and a $300 million grant that the Michigan legislature must approve. With the funding, Holtec hopes to get the plant in working order and sell it to someone who will operate it. Holtec itself bought the plant from Entergy, which operated the plant for about 50 years.
Assuming both the feds and the state approve the funding, Holtec could begin the formal bureaucratic work of restarting Palisades in October, Fleming said. By that time, the DOE loan, if it comes through, will be finalized, said Fleming.
But DOE could deliver a conditional loan statement much sooner, by July or so. If it does, Holtec will loop the NRC in then, Fleming said, and begin early discussions intended to pave the way for a license amendment request in the fall.
Holtec needs several exemptions to federal regulations as part of the license amendment request it hopes to apply for after the summer, and commission staff said Wednesday that there will be a lot of pre-application work to do at NRC.
Bureaucratically, Holtec’s biggest lift will be to get out from under an NRC regulation that prohibits electricity generation at Palisades since the defueling of the reactor.
That exemption, to Title 10, section 50.82 of the Code of Federal Regulations, is “absolutely critical” to the regulatory trail Holtec hopes to blaze, Fleming said at Wednesday’s meeting. And that exemption is only one of several, detailed on page 6 of Holtec’s presentation to NRC, that the company plans to roll up with its license amendment request.
