The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will not exempt from environmental review Holtec International’s plan to restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, the agency said last week.
Holtec wants to restart the plant, which closed two years ago, in August 2025 and had asked NRC for what is known as a categorical exemption from environmental review.
But agency staff, some of whom have previously been skeptical about letting the plant wind back up without some sort of environmental review, have decided instead to conduct an environmental assessment of Holtec’s plan.
“[T]he NRC does not yet know the significance of potential impacts from the proposed actions” at Palisades, the agency wrote in a Federal Register notice dated June 27.
For that reason, and others, the commission plans to hold a public meeting in Benton Harbor, Mich., on July 11 to discuss the pending review. That meeting will be webcast, according to the notice.
Holtec in March got a 1.5-billion loan from the Department of Energy to restart Palisades, which the Jupiter, Fla., company bought from Entergy to decommission.
If NRC grants the various, and in one case unprecedented, regulatory actions Holtec seeks, Palisades could become the first commercial U.S. power plant to transition back to generation after entering decommissioning.
Editor’s note, July 2, 2024, 8:50 a.m. Eastern time: the story was corrected to show when the NRC published its Federal Register notice.
