Holtec International made its first filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to support a restart of the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Covert, Mich., the company announced Friday.
Holtec on Sept. 28 asked the NRC for relief from a commission regulation that forbids refueling a shuttered reactor that has been emptied in preparation for decommissioning. The commission posted the filing online Friday.
Holtec says it still needs a loan of more than $1 billion from the Department of Energy to restart Palisades, which shut down in 2022.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Vistra, Irving, Texas, to take over and operate nuclear power plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania from Energy Harbor.
The company announced the approval in a press release on Sept. 29. NRC approved the transfer in a Sept. 28 order. The transferred plants are: Beaver Valley, Shippingport, Pa.; Davis-Besse, Oak Harbor, Ohio; and Perry, North Perry, Ohio. Vistra in March announced it would acquire the plants for a total of about $3 billion.
Orano USA, the U.S. arm of the French-majority-owned nuclear services company, this week announced three executive changes that the company says will hone its focus on the emerging market for advanced nuclear reactors and the fuel that powers them, the company wrote in a press release this week.
Armand Laferrere, previously with Orano predecessor company Areva, will be Orano USA’s senior executive vice president, secretary general and partnerships, leading business development with U.S. companies. Jean-Luc Palayer, already at Orano USA, will be the company’s USA vice president of business operations, with a focus on nuclear fuel. Brad Beard, joining the company from Smart Wires, will become Orano USA’s chief operations officer.
Reversing a decision by the city assembly, the mayor of Tsushima, Japan, a small city on an island in the Korea Strait, refused to allow the city to be surveyed as a candidate for a future nuclear waste repository, a Japanese English-language newspaper reported last week.
The city council narrowly approved the survey in September by a vote of 10-8, Japanese English-language media reported. Tsushima has roughly 28,000 residents, according to the results of a 2020 Japanese census posted on the city’s website.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) this week began the second discharge of irradiated wastewater from the cleanup of the shuttered Fukushima-Daiichi Nuclear Power station, according to a press release from the utility.
The discharge began on Thursday following preparations at the plant on Tuesday, the company said. TEPCO first discharged irradiated wastewater generated by cleanup of the plant’s three reactors on Aug. 24. The reactors melted down in 2011 after a tsunami caused by an offshore earthquake.
