Members of the public this week weighed in on a proposal to bring a recently-shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant back online during a Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting.
During the meeting Thursday evening NRC was set to receive public comments on Palisades Nuclear Generating Station’s post-decommissioning shutdown activities report (PSDAR), an action plan required for dismantling the facility, which went offline May 20.
Some stakeholders, however, also took the opportunity to give their input on a plan developing between the state of Michigan and current plant operator Holtec International to give the Covert, Mich., Palisades plant a new lease on life.
“We want [Holtec], the NRC and other parties to know that we strongly oppose reopening Palisades,” said Iris Potter, a coordinator at local anti-nuclear group Michigan Safe Energy Future.
New Jersey-based Holtec said Sep. 11 that it had applied for federal funding through the Department of Energy’s roughly $6 billion civil nuclear credits program in hopes of using the bailout to find an interested buyer to restart the plant. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) supports the plan.
Holtec which acquired Palisades in June from former operator Entergy, has also floated the site as a potential location for a future small modular reactor (SMR) prototype.
“We have said for years that we don’t want any new reactors there, or an SMR. For five years, we have been told [Palisades] will be shut down, and now it is,” Potter said. She also asked NRC whether a Palisades restart would render the plant’s current PSDAR “moot.”
NRC staff at the meeting declined to comment on the proposed restart. “Right now, the focus of this meeting is on the PSDAR and on next steps to support the shutdown of the facility,” said Shaun Anderson, chief of reactor decommissioning at the agency’s Division of Decommissioning, Uranium Recovery, and Waste Programs.
Meanwhile, Eric Meyer, executive director of pro-nuclear group Generation Atomic, told NRC that restarting the plant was a “huge opportunity” for both economic and environmental advancement in Michigan.
“We are already seeing a dramatic increase in the use of coal and fossil fuels after closing Palisades down,” Meyer said. “I know we’re here to talk about decommissioning, but I do think that the safest thing to do is restart the facility, because of all of the air pollution and climate impacts that will be avoided as a result.”
Whether Palisades will actually come back online remains to be seen. According to DOE guidelines for its civil nuclear credits program, NRC must review potential awardees and affirm that their nuclear reactors would continue to safely operate in accordance with their licenses.
The commission declined to comment Sep. 15 on whether the agency could give a reasonable assurance that the Palisades plant would continue to operate in line with licensing standards as prescribed by DOE’s review.
