The Michigan legislature on Wednesday evening easily passed a bill that would provide a $150-million grant to help restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert County.
If signed by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the bill would provide half the funding that Holtec International, the current Palisades owner, has said it needed from the state to restart the plant, which shut down about a year ago.
“Today’s announcement is a triumph for Michigan, the local community, and the country,” Patrick O’Brien, Patrick O’Brien director of government affairs and communications for Holtec, Jupiter, Fla. “We are delighted to have been awarded funding by Michigan and grateful for their strong partnership in the repowering of Palisades. We look forward to collaborating closely with the state and other stakeholders throughout this transformative endeavor.”
The funding is part of an omnibus appropriations act, HB 4437, that would fund all of Michigan’s state agencies. The state Senate approved the bill 61-47 and the state House of Representatives approved the measure 445-26. Whitmer had not signed the bill as of Thursday.
The legislation comes with strings attached. The funding it provides, to be handed out by Michigan’s Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity, would be available only to an applicant who has also secured federal funding from the Department of Energy to restart Palisades.
Holtec has applied for more than $1 billion in funding from the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office. DOE on Wednesday did not respond to a query about whether the agency had issued Holtec a conditional loan statement: a preliminary approval that Holtec executives have said could arrive in July.
If Holtec gets all the government funding it wants, the company says it will need to find someone to operate the plant under a roughly 20-year power purchase agreement. It will take about that long to repay the loans the company is seeking to repower the single-reactor plant, which could be back up and running two-and-a-half years after Holtec secures the funding it says it needs.
Palisades’ license is set to expire in 2031.
Meanwhile, in parallel with its efforts to resuscitate the plant, Holtec is preparing to decommission Palisades, in case the largely unprecedented plan to bring the single-reactor facility back from the dead falls through.
When it bought Palisades in June 2022, Holtec estimated it would cost about $644 million to safely bring down the plant. Michigan’s attorney general had contested that figure, but Nuclear Commission Staff in May found that the price tag was reasonable.
To give the restart plan some breathing room, and to allow the plant’s decommissioning trust fund to collect interest, Holtec does not plan to begin decommissioning Palisades, if that becomes necessary, until the 2030s.
