Two hundred miles northwest of Toledo, along the shoreline of one of the world’s largest and most picturesque freshwater lakes, a nuclear power experiment believed never to have been tried before is getting serious consideration.
The mothballed Palisades nuclear plant, along Lake Michigan’s eastern shoreline, could be restarted a little more than a year from now, in late 2025, if the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission gives the go-ahead.
The NRC has a restart panel listening to pros and cons now. The next public meeting is expected in July.
Palisades itself isn’t new. The plant began operating March 24, 1971, and continued for more than 50 years.
On May 20, 2022, its previous owner, New Orleans-based Entergy, closed it because it had become too costly to operate.
Here’s what is taking the world into uncharted territory: No plant has gone back into service after entering its decommissioning phase.
That’s certainly true across the United States and believed to be true globally, according to Jason W. Kozal, director of the Division of Operating Reactor Safety for the NRC’s Midwest region in Lisle, Ill., which is in charge of plant oversight. Mr. Kozal also is co-chairman of the Palisades Nuclear Plant Restart Panel.
“This is a precedent-setting activity. As far as we know, no plant worldwide that has gone into decommissioning has requested to go back online,” Mr. Kozal said. “It's the first time in America, and we're pretty sure it's the first time in the world.”
Palisades is in Van Buren County's Covert Township, a 432-acre site in southwest Michigan five miles south of one of Lake Michigan’s best-known vacation paradises, South Haven. It’s about a three-hour drive from downtown Toledo and an hour-drive due west of downtown Kalamazoo.
The plan to restart it is coming from the plant’s latest owner, Holtec Decommissioning International, which is based Camden, N.J. The parent company, Holtec International, is in Jupiter, Fla.
Holtec has never operated a nuclear plant, Mr. Kozal said.
The company got involved with the property because it’s in the business of decommissioning them. Decommissioning is an industry term for dismantling nuclear plants.
“Holtec, as a company, has not operated a nuclear plant,” Mr. Kozal said. “However, the majority of workers at the plant are longtime Palisades employees.”
Holtec acquired Palisades in June, 2022. On July 31, 2023, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law the state of Michigan’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget, which provided $150 million in funding for the plant’s restart.
In October of 2023, Holtec applied to the U.S. Department of Energy Department for a loan to restart the plant. It was notified in late March this year that it would receive $1.52 billion from the Biden Administration.
The company also is seeking money to build small modular reactors, or SMRs, on the Palisades site. SMR technology is still under review by the NRC, but the industry has high hopes of getting many built to replace or supplement power generated by large commercial plants such as Palisades.
Most of America’s commercial-scale nuclear plants have two resident NRC inspectors serving as the agency’s eyes and ears. They report their findings to the NRC daily.
Later this year, the NRC plans to assign two resident inspectors to Palisades for the first time since the plant’s shutdown. That will give them time to inspect the restart activities if they’re authorized and become more familiar with the plant if it’s put back into service, Mr. Kozal said.
“They're going to be there well before any potential restart to get familiar with the site,” he said.
Several things came together to motivate the restart request, not the least of which is a greater need — in Michigan and other parts of the world — to address climate change.
Ms. Whitmer and former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, now serving in President Biden’s Cabinet as U.S. Department of Energy secretary, are interested in seeing Palisades restarted.
Nuclear plants don’t emit climate-altering carbon dioxide while operating, only during construction, decommissioning, and during the process of mining uranium and packing it into fuel assemblies for reactor cores.
Palisades is a big, 800-mw source of power that could help Governor Whitmer move closer toward achieving the state’s new goal for reduced emissions under her MI Healthy Climate Plan, which aspires to have the state carbon-free by 2050. It was approved by the Michigan Legislature, and was signed into law by Governor Whitmer in 2023.
There also are economic incentives, such as jobs and more tax revenue.
The governor’s office has said Palisades has a $363 million impact on the southwest Michigan economy, supports 600 good-paying jobs, and produces enough electricity for 800,000 homes.
Local officials also have talked highly of the plan.
“It's very important we have this carbon-free energy for the state and for the climate in general,” Van Buren County Administrator John Faul said during a recent NRC meeting.
Mike Chappell, a Van Buren County commissioner, said there’s a need for more electricity and that Palisades “would enhance energy security by diversifying [energy sources.”
“Palisades has always been a good neighbor,” Mr. Chappell told the NRC.
But the project has fierce opposition from anti-nuclear groups such as Monroe-based Don’t Waste Michigan and Takoma Park, Md.-based Beyond Nuclear.
David Lochbaum, a retired nuclear safety engineer who spent years working for the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said he believes there are too many engineering issues for Palisades to overcome.
He predicted the effort to revive it will be akin to what happened 175 miles to the northeast in Midland, Mich. 40 years ago, when Consumers Power scrapped plans to build a nuclear plant in 1984 after being 13 years behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. Consumers was 85 percent done with that project, which — at the time at least — was the most costly abandonment of an energy project.
“Palisades has about the same chance of restarting as I do of winning the lottery, and I don't even buy lottery tickets,” Mr. Lochbaum told The Blade. “Suppose Palisades actually does restart. Who ponies up the millions already spent decommissioning an operating reactor? Not me. I'd rather buy lottery tickets.”
Among many problems Mr. Lochbaum cited at Palisades were a long history of seal failures, which he outlined in a six-page, 2010 issue brief published by UCS.
Entergy said at the time of the plant’s closing in 2022 that it was shutting it down 11 days earlier than announced “due to the performance of a control rod drive seal," according to a Holland Sentinel article published on May 24, 2022.
Kevin Kamps, a longtime anti-nuclear activist for Beyond Nuclear, grew up in nearby Kalamazoo, while current NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson grew up in nearby South Haven.
Mr. Kamps, who serves as the group’s radioactive waste specialist, questions the extent to which Entergy replaced aging materials when it owned Palisades.
”Under this rushed schedule, there is no possible way for Holtec to complete all the decades-long overdue system repairs, refurbishment, replacements, and safety-critical upgrades previous owner Entergy never got around to [doing] over the 15 years of its ownership of Palisades, and then ultimately simply walked away from,” Mr. Kamps said.
He said Holtec’s master plan for Palisades is “a losing argument.”
“The fact is that safer, cleaner nonradioactive power sources — such as renewables, storage, and efficiency — are much quicker and significantly more cost-effective to bring online,” Mr. Kamps said. “They are not hamstrung by the troubling security, safety, radioactive waste disposal, and regulatory issues plaguing nuclear reactors.”
But Kris Singh, Holtec president and chief executive officer, said in the spring that repowering Palisades “will restore safe, around-the-clock generation to hundreds of thousands of households, businesses, and manufacturers.”
“It also confers the environmental and public health benefits of emissions-free generation, hundreds of high-paying local jobs with a large union work force, economic growth, and the social benefits of a strong community partner,” he said.
Mr. Kozal said the plant review will take aging and embrittled parts into consideration, and that the NRC will not allow that plant or any others back into service if it has questions about the reliability of the materials.
He said the NRC has “tools we can use to provide a more intrusive inspection.”
“When we initially started this a year ago, we had the same questions because it was a great unknown,” Mr. Kozal said.
Holtec will be required to develop a plan for restoring systems, including those materials that are believed to have aged too much, Mr. Kozal said.
One thing that could go in favor of a successful Palisades restart is the relatively short amount of time the plant has been mothballed.
Two years is the same amount of time that northwest Ohio’s Davis-Besse nuclear plant sat idle after its original reactor head nearly burst apart in 2002 because of lackluster maintenance for at least six years.
The plant came two-tenths of an inch away from a rupture that would have formed radioactive steam in containment for the first time on U.S. soil since the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident near Harrisburg, Pa., in March of 1979. A record fine was imposed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Davis-Besse was owned by Akron-based First Energy Corp. back then and is now owned by Irving, Texas-based Vistra.
It was restarted in 2004, and has operated the past 20 years without the NRC identifying significant safety issues beyond some unusual ground settling and a lack of sealant for the containment building. The latter was finally applied, decades after it was required, to resolve some exterior cracking and help that structure stand up to more harsh weather along the Lake Erie shoreline.
Fuel was removed from the Palisades reactor core on June 10, 2022, Viktoria Mitlyng, NRC spokesman, said. That’s less than a month after the plant was shut down.
Palisades is licensed through March 24, 2031. Holtec has indicated that it will seek a 20-year license extension immediately if the plan to restart it succeeds.
Mr. Kozal agreed that the plant’s underground piping must be proven safe to operate again, as well as the plant’s reactor, its massive steam generators, and its turbines.
“It's only been shut down for two years,” he said. “But it's still been dormant for two years.”
First Published June 9, 2024, 12:30 p.m.
