The state of Illinois wants Washington to step up and save its economically-troubled nuclear power plants after the Prairie State’s multi-million dollar bailout bill expires, a state senator said Tuesday.
“[O]ur hope is that this issue will be taken on at the federal level and that it will have an answer at the federal level,” said state Sen. Sue Rezin (R-38) during a Tuesday webinar held by the nuclear professional organization American Nuclear Society (ANS). “Every state that has a nuclear power plant has stranded assets, so this really, truly, is a federal issue,” Rezin said.
President Joe Biden in November signed a trillion-dollar infrastructure package that contained around $6 billion in federal funding for struggling nuclear power plants, to be auctioned off to eligible nuclear plants by the Department of Energy. DOE has said that it could be a little while until it could provide any more details about how that auction process would work.
Springfield this year had already taken action to save its nuclear fleet.
In September, Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) greenlit a roughly $700 million bailout for Illinois’s nuclear plants, coming in clutch for the state’s Byron and Dresden plants, which operator Exelon has said are being refueled thanks to the extra cash, despite earlier plans to shutter both sites.
Rezin expressed some optimism Tuesday that the feds could keep the U.S. nuclear fleet online. “We have an administration at the federal level, the Biden administration, that acknowledges that nuclear is an important asset to have in your energy portfolio,” she said.
Despite that, nuclear plants across the country are going down much faster than they’re coming up. Michigan’s Palisades plant is next on the chopping block, slated to close in early 2022. New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which shut down April 30, was the most recent site to go offline.
