WASHINGTON — The head of the Department of Energy’s nuclear power office said this week that the agency was preparing to roll out its second round of bailouts for economically-troubled nuclear power plants.
Applications for the next funding cycle of DOE’s civil nuclear credits program will open “soon,” Assistant Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff told RadWaste Monitor after a hearing Thursday in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Huff declined to provide a timeline.
DOE’s roughly $6 billion civil nuclear credits program, unveiled as part of the November 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is aimed at providing a financial crutch for the nation’s struggling nuclear power fleet. The first round of awards, restricted to only nuclear plants facing imminent closure, approved up to $1.1 billion in aid for California’s Diablo Canyon Power Plant.
That was substantially all of the funding available in round one.
The second funding cycle, announced in late September, “does not restrict eligibility to applicants who have publicly announced intentions to cease operations,” DOE said in draft guidelines for the award.
The agency has been directed by law to split up the $6 billion bailout program across five years, annualized at roughly $1.2 billion. DOE in September shifted the program’s award period to a calendar-year basis from a fiscal-year basis, a move aimed at aligning the program with a nuclear production tax credit made law under August’s Inflation Reduction Act.
As of Friday, DOE had not made any announcements about the second round of credits, or when applications might open.
