The Department of Energy recently hedged a little about an agency official’s prediction that the first civil nuclear credits made available in November’s big infrastructure bill will be awarded by early summer.
Although Andrew Griffith, DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for nuclear fuel cycle and supply chain, estimated during a Feb. 28 webinar that the agency would start doling out credits for nuclear power operators around June, that projection is “an estimate for our best case scenario,” a DOE spokesperson told RadWaste Monitor via email March 11.
The timing of the agency’s first awards will depend on the responses it receives from a Feb. 15 request for information (RFI) on the credits program, the spokesperson said. After that, DOE should finalize a request for applications, certify qualifying nuclear plant operators, and then start allocating awards. The RFI period closed Thursday.
“The timeline is guided by a statute-specific approach to implementation, which the CNC team is refining in consultation with Federal partners,” the spokesperson said.
DOE said in a December blog post that it had planned to issue the first round of credits this fall.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in November, greenlit a total of $6 billion in credits for nuclear plant operators over five years, which DOE suggested in its RFI could be paid out in annual $1.2 billion segments.
The agency also proposed that operators demonstrate, among other criteria, that they’re losing money on their plants and that closing the sites will contribute negatively to carbon emissions.
As the feds work on hammering out the details of their credits scheme, nuclear power plants are closing down.
Michigan’s Palisades plant is the next facing shutdown around May. Three plants were slated to go offline last year but two were saved by bailouts at the state level. New York’s Indian Point went dark in April but Byron and Dresden in Illinois were saved in September.
