In a regulatory filing made public this week, Holtec International gave itself a little wiggle room and said it would restart the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan by the end of September 2025.
Holtec, Jupiter, Fla., in late March got the Department of Energy to conditionally agree to loan the company $1.5 billion for the restart, long favored by the local government in Calvert County Mich., and the state government in Lansing, Mich. The company had previously said it would restart Palisades by August 2025, and it still may.
While the Department of Energy issued a request for qualifications for potential developers of solar projects at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, DOE expects to hold an information day soon on other carbon-free energy projects that would take longer to permit and build.
The request for qualifications, published in March, supports DOE’s goal to meet President Joe Biden’s goal in Executive Order 14057 reaching net 100% carbon-free energy usage at Savannah River by 2030, according to documents made public last week.
“DOE will host a separate information day in May 2024 for parties interested in promoting other CFE [carbon-free energy] technologies for generation and storage that are further away from commercial readiness,” according to materials released in connection with an April 11 online procurement update.
A local newspaper reported that a mysterious California man has told people that he plans to build a nuclear waste facility on land somewhere near a small desert town about 150 miles northeast by road of Los Angeles.
The hard-to-pin-down Rudy Salazar has lately distributed flyers to residents of the tiny town of Randsburg, Calif., “announcing his intent” to build some sort of waste facility on 58 acres of land he claims to own, according to the local Daily Independent.
AtkinsRéalis this week opened a $20-million technology center in Richland, Wash., near the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site to develop nuclear and environmental cleanup technology.
The 16,000-square-foot facility opened Thursday next to the existing AtkinsRéalis Engineering Laboratory and the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus, the company announced in a Thursday press release. Construction on the new technology center started in September 2022 and was finished in 15 months.
Nuclear robotics technology and a Pacific Northwest Hydrogen Hub will be featured at the technology center, AtkinsRéalis said in the release.
The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board planned to host a meeting May 21-22 about high-level radioactive waste disposal in crystalline host rocks and the corrosion of commercial spent nuclear fuel after disposal.
The meeting was to take place at the Hilton Downtown Knoxville Hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee. The meeting was also scheduled to stream online at the board’s website. The board is a small, independent federal agency that provides technical advice about nuclear waste to the Department of Energy .
Obituary
Barclay Lew, who worked on the licensing of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant in California, and consulted for multiple Department of Energy nuclear weapon sites, died Jan. 15 in Honolulu, according to an obituary posted online this week. He was 72.
Lew worked at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colo., the Hanford Site in Washington State and DOE headquarters, according to the obit.
