The sale of a Michigan nuclear power plant could be final before Independence Day so an anti-nuclear group and the state attorney general have only about three months to get a public hearing on the transaction with the NRC — which has yet to say yay or nay, an agency spokesperson said this week.
Hearing requests from Beyond Nuclear and state Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) on the sale of Palisades Nuclear Generating Station are still “a pending adjudicatory matter in front of the commission,” the NRC spokesperson said via email Wednesday. The agency’s three serving commissioners have the authority to approve such requests directly but as of Wednesday afternoon they had yet to schedule a meeting to consider a possible Palisades hearing.
NRC in December approved the Covert, Mich., plant’s sale to Holtec International from Entergy. Holtec has said that it could make the transaction final by June or so — Palisades is scheduled to shutter around May.
“NRC has made a mockery of the [Atomic Safety and Licensing Board] adjudicatory hearing process,” Beyond Nuclear radioactive waste specialist Kevin Kamps told RadWaste Monitor in an email Thursday. “We were given a scant 20 days in which to intervene, a very short and strict deadline which we nonetheless met. Here it is, more than 13 months later, and we still have not been given our day in court, so to speak, by the NRC.”
A spokesperson for Holtec declined to comment on the hearing requests. Nessel’s office did not respond to a request for comment by deadline Friday.
Holtec in January informed NRC that it had dissolved Comprehensive Decommissioning International (CDI), its four-year-old joint venture with Canadian nuclear services company SNC-Lavalin, for convenience. CDI was the primary contractor for decommissioning Palisades. Holtec has said that it would absorb the joint venture’s assets.
SNC-Lavalin’s business character was one of the issues Beyond Nuclear raised in its February 2021 hearing request. The anti-nuclear group said at the time that the company had “been debarred, seen their officers and employees convicted of bribery for contracts in multiple countries, generated illegal campaign contributions, and other civil and criminal wrongdoing.”
SNC-Lavalin in 2013 was debarred by the World Bank for a period of 10 years following misconduct related to a construction project in Bangladesh. The international monetary body in 2021 lifted those sanctions early, citing compliance with the debarment agreement.
Holtec told NRC in January that dissolving CDI “moots” Beyond Nuclear’s contention. Kamps told RadWaste Monitor in a Feb. 4 email that “nothing is mooted” by what he called Holtec’s “latest company-shell-game move.”
Camden, N.J.-based Holtec currently has five decommissioning projects, including Palisades. The company is also working at the Pilgrim plant in Massachusetts, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, and Indian Point in New York. NRC in December approved Holtec to take over spent fuel management at Michigan’s already-decommissioned Big Rock Point plant.
