ROCKVILLE, MD. — A company seeking federal funds to restart a shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant is in for a heavy lift, one of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s newest members said during an exclusive interview this week.
“When you have a reactor that has ceased operations, and you’ve offloaded the fuel, that’s a major milestone,” said NRC Commissioner Bradley Crowell during an interview with RadWaste Monitor Tuesday at the agency’s Rockville, Md., headquarters. “To reverse course would trigger almost the entire licensing process again.”
Nuclear services company Holtec International, which currently owns the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station, has said it would apply for a federal bailout for the facility as part of the second round Department of Energy’s civil nuclear credits program. If approved, the company has said it would seek a willing buyer to take ownership of the Covert, Mich., plant and bring it back online.
Such an action would be a pretty tall order, for both regulator and applicant, Crowell said.
“Certainly, the entire operation of the plant needs to be reassessed,” Crowell. “It’s not the same as a refueling outage, and it’s not the same as a license renewal.”
As for NRC’s role in a potential restart, Crowell — who joined the commission in August — said it would be difficult for the safety regulator to prepare for such a development because of the uncertainty surrounding Palisades’ fate.
“I feel like it’s difficult to get our ducks in a row for that because it changes almost on a monthly basis,” Crowell said. “I understand they [Holtec] are in a posture of wanting to find a buyer to do it … but I think at this stage of the game, you’re gonna have to start from scratch.”
Holtec does not think so.
In a heavily redacted letter, dated Feb. 1 and posted online by NRC this week, the company floated a possible “regulatory path” to restart Palisades, writing that “there is reasonable assurance” of restoring power at the plant “within the reactor’s previous licensing basis” and without “significant safety hazards.”
A spokesperson for Holtec told RadWaste Monitor that the content of its letter had been redacted because it contained “business proprietary information.”
DOE, meanwhile, has not yet opened applications for the second round of its nuclear plant bailout.
An agency spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor last week that it planned to release application guidance some time in the first quarter of 2023. So far, Holtec appears to be the only plant operator seeking funding in this cycle — DOE in November rejected the company’s application for a Palisades bailout under the first round of awards.
“It’s unfortunate, for those who are proponents of the plant, that they didn’t move on it earlier,” Crowell said Tuesday.
Updated 02/13/2023 2:46 p.m. ET with comment from Holtec.
