Holtec International holds out hope that it will receive a major chunk of change from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office to help restart the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Generating Station in Michigan by 2025, a spokesperson said Thursday.
The company expects DOE to make a decision in “late January/Early February at the earliest,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. That is the timeframe, the spokesperson said, that the agency might make a conditional commitment to a loan. Holtec at one point thought that conditional commitment would arrive in July 2023.
Holtec has repeatedly declined to deny reporting that it seeks at least $1 billion from DOE, though there are indications that the company may want much more.
NuScale Power Corp., Portland, Ore., announced this week it will lay off nearly a third of its workforce in the wake of a canceled project to deploy the company’s small modular reactors.
NuScale, majority owned by Fluor, will cut 154 full time staff, resulting in savings of between $50 million and $60 million, the company said in a press release. In November, citing lack of buyers for the electricity they would generate, NuScale announced that it and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems canceled plans to deploy small modular reactors that would have supplied power to seven states.
Rick McLeod, a longtime hand on Department of Energy weapons complex issues, has joined the Washington, D.C.-based Energy Communities Alliance to help the advocacy group’s community-based siting program for radioactive waste.
McLeod retired as head of the non-profit Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization about a year ago and has been doing consulting work. Energy Communities Alliance is developing materials for municipalities looking at hosting consolidated interim storage facilities for radioactive waste, McLeod said in a LinkedIn post.
This week the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved construction of a near-surface disposal facility at the Chalk River Laboratories site in Deep River, Ontario after finding the facility would not cause significant ill effects to a nearby river or traditional land of indigenous peoples.
The quasi-judicial tribunal announced the decision in a Jan. 9 press release following issuance of a record of decision. There was some First Nations tribal opposition to the decision, according to published accounts in the Canadian press.
Chalk River Laboratories, owned by the federal Crown corporation Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, applied in 2017 to build a disposal facility for up to 1 million cubic meters of solid low-level radioactive waste, such as building materials and contaminated personal protective clothing. Most of it is now stored at the Chalk River lab site. Some will come from other Atomic Energy of Canada Limited sites as well as Canadian universities and hospitals. A backgrounder on the project can be found here.
Joseph Hendrie, who chaired the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the response to the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in 1979, died Dec. 26, media reported this week. He was 98.
Hendrie was a PhD physicist who spent some 20 years in technical and administrative roles on nuclear reactor projects in academia and government before joining the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, then a relatively new agency, in 1977, according to his NRC bio.
