Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm is holding out hope that the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan, which she governed from 2003 to 2007, will roar back to life.
“There is hopefully an effort to try to revive that,” Granholm testified Thursday during a frequently contentious hearing of the House Energy and Commerce energy, climate, and grid security subcommittee. “That will be coming through our … loan office program office.”
Holtec in February applied for a DOE loan to restart Palisades, which the company acquired from Entergy after the plant shut down in May. Even if the loan goes through, Holtec says it will still need hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the state to find a buyer to restart the plant.
Telework availability is “the biggest issue” driving a decline in staff morality at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Commissioner Jeff Baran told Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week.
Baran testified because he is up for a five-year renomination to the commission.
“My sense is that a significant cause of that decline in job satisfaction had to do with our reentry from maximum telework in November 2021. We … ended up being really one of the first agencies to go back to the office,” Baran said during the hearing. NRC is spending “a lot of time” figuring out “the approaches we have to make sure that we strike a good balance just in terms of the number of days people are at work versus home. … [W]hen they’re in the office, we don’t want them just sitting in their cubicle all day in a [Microsoft] Teams meeting like they would be at home.”
The Albuquerque Journal’s editorial board criticized New Mexico’s congressional delegation for issuing “cheap partisan sound bites” this week in their joint statement opposing Holtec International’s proposed interim storage site in the state.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week gave Holtec a 40-year license to store spent nuclear fuel in the HI-STORE facility the Jupiter, Fla.-based company has proposed for southeastern New Mexico. Local governments have supported the plant.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy this week spread around more than $20 million to 10 industry projects including microreactors and hydrogen generation at nuclear power plants, the agency said in a press release.
The funding comes from the Office of Nuclear Energy’s industry funding opportunity announcement. This is the final round of funding for the program, which since 2018 has invested about $230 million into nearly 50 projects, DOE said.
