Holtec International and Pacific Gas and Electric were scheduled to speak to Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff on Wednesday about novel regulatory efforts to extend the lives of two nuclear power plants.
Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., was scheduled to go first, with their 10:00 a.m. Eastern presentation to commission staff about the regulatory pathway to restart the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station near Covert, Mich.
Palisades shut down almost exactly a year ago, but Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has pressed Holtec, which bought the plant to decommission it, to find a buyer who could fire the plant’s reactor back up. Holtec says it needs several hundreds of millions of dollars from the state, and more from the federal government, in the form of a Department of Energy loan, to make the plan work.
In congressional testimony earlier in May, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, herself a former Michigan governor, said she was hopeful that restart would work out.
Meanwhile, Holtec has already met with the NRC to start hashing out what would be, in the U.S., an unprecedented effort to restart a mothballed reactor and use it to pump electricity back into the grid.
In documents briefed to commission staff in March, Holtec roughed out the bureaucratic plan of attack for bringing Palisades back from the dead: a combination of a license amendment request and one-time exemptions from NRC regulations. Holtec has kept much of its strategy close to the vest. Slides and a letter Holtec sent to NRC staff are in places heavily redacted.
After Holtec wraps up its presentation about Palisades, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), operator of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in Avila Beach, Calif., was scheduled to discuss its plans to prolong the life of the plant’s two reactors by about five years, to around 2030.
Diablo Canyon last year secured billions of dollars in state and federal subsidies from California and the DOE’s Civilian Nuclear Credits program, which Congress created in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2022.
With less time left on Diablo canyon’s operating license than it will take for NRC to vet an application to extend those licenses, the commission has agreed to let PG&E keep the reactors running beyond their license expiration dates, provided the utility submits a license renewal application to the commission by Dec. 31.
PG&E has promised to do just that and, on Wednesday, was to brief NRC staff about some of the steps it will take prior to and after the planned application to manage the plant’s aging infrastructure, according to slides the utility sent to the commission ahead of Wednesday’s scheduled 4:00 p.m. Eastern session.
