Mothballed nuclear plant on brink of revival

E&E News

4 days ago

The sleepy 2,500-person Covert Township in Michigan is on the cusp of setting a new milestone amid what many are calling a U.S. nuclear renaissance.
In October, Palisades nuclear generating station is expected to become the country's first commercial reactor to reopen after fully shutting down. The milestone comes amid a resurgence in public support for nuclear power and state and federal leaders' readiness to financially back the projects.
The Biden administration committed a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to the Palisades restart, and the Trump administration has since continued those disbursements even as it moves to freeze other green energy dollars.
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'We've got two administrations with very different philosophies on energy, both saying this makes sense to move ahead with bringing Palisades back,' said Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), who represents Covert's congressional district.
'All the infrastructure is there. There's no long, drawn-out permitting process. It's not like it's a new greenfield development. It's been there for decades,' he continued.
But to Kevin Kamps, a staffer at the Maryland-based watchdog group Beyond Nuclear and a Michigan native, the planned reopening of Palisades is an impending 'nuclear nightmare.' Beyond Nuclear contested the plan at virtually every step of the vetting process and now 'fully intend[s] to appeal to the federal courts,' Kamps said.
Reopening Palisades, Kamps said, means 'risking a Chernobyl on the Michigan shoreline.' Other advocates are concerned about the future environmental health of the Great Lakes, which account for over 20 percent of the world's surface freshwater.
'You're out of your mind'
Opened in 1971, Palisades ran for over 50 years on the shores of Lake Michigan with no serious accidents. The single-reactor plant can produce 800 megawatts, enough to supply roughly 6 percent of Michigan's electricity needs.
From the moment then-owner Entergy announced its intention to decommission the plant in 2018, people moved to save it, said Adam Stein, director of nuclear energy and innovation at the Breakthrough Institute.
'Entergy wanted to move out of the generation space and back into being a regulated utility, at least in the north, and was selling [Palisades] to Holtec International to move into the decommissioning space,' Stein said. 'It had a long-term purchasing power agreement at the time, it was making a profit, [and had] a license that extended several more years.'
Despite efforts from Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) to save the plant, it officially closed in June 2022.
'If you had asked either one of us before we were shutting this plant down, 'Would this restart?' we probably would have both said, 'You're out of your mind,'' said Pat O'Brien, Holtec's government affairs director, on a call with POLITICO's E&E News.
Nick Culp, Holtec's senior manager of government affairs, added: 'That is a big undertaking by a single state to say, 'We're gonna be the first to do this.' I would say that's where the leadership really made a difference.'
After an inquiry from Whitmer, Holtec followed a slow decommissioning process. Meanwhile, the prospect of a restart also caught the eye of Biden's Energy Department secretary, Jennifer Granholm.
'Where it made sense for us is when we got in discussions with DOE and the Loan Programs Office about what it would look like if we were to try to work with them for potential funding,' O'Brien said.
In September 2023, Holtec announced a new agreement for the plant to sell power to Wolverine Power Cooperative, officially kicking off the restart process that's expected to generate 600 permanent jobs. Eventually, the state and federal governments together pledged $1.8 billion to restart the plant. Last May, Holtec cleared a major hurdle when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's environmental assessment concluded there were no significant environmental impacts associated with resuming the plant's operations.
Locals are ready to welcome the plant back.
'The vast majority and overwhelming response that we've seen has been positive on this,' Huizenga said in an interview, adding that his constituents 'are very, very enthusiastic about everything from the jobs that get created to tax base to the need for an energy base load.'
The opposition
Not everyone is happy to see Palisades returning. One of Kamps' main safety concerns with the reopening of Palisades has been the potential degradation of tubes in the steam generator.
Steam generators use thousands of tubes for heat exchange, which can become damaged over time, reducing power output. To restore efficiency, damaged tubes at Palisades are sleeved — a process of inserting a smaller pipe to seal off damage while maintaining water flow. Some activists are concerned about those sleeves swelling or shifting under extreme heat and blocking the flow.
'They are not real concerns,' Stein said. 'If you are at the temperature at which that would happen, there are already larger concerns in the reactor anyway.'
Stein adds that if a sleeve does move and block flow, it's not an immediate danger so much as a loss of efficiency.
The NRC's assessment reached the same conclusion as Stein, with staff concurring that finding a solution to prevent sleeve movement under high temperatures is not important enough to delay the restart timeline.
From Detroit, activist Jesse Deer in Water, a member of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, advocates for tribal rights and belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Radioactive waste is the crux of his worries about the plant reopening.
'Not only is it making the people sick, it's making the land sick too,' he said about the effects of Palisades and its locally stored radioactive waste.
A 2013 non-peer-reviewed report by Joseph Mangano, who heads a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to studying how radioactivity affects public health, found that the 'death rate for all cancers combined' in Van Buren County, where Palisades is located, 'was 10.5% below the Michigan rate in the 1970s, but is now 12.0% above the state.'
But the NRC's environmental assessment found that thyroid cancer rates in Van Buren County were consistently below the state average from 2001 to 2020.
'There are no studies to date that definitively demonstrate a correlation between radiation dose from nuclear power facilities and cancer incidence in the general public,' the assessment said.
Environmental activists are also fearful of the new small modular reactors (SMRs) Holtec plans to build and test at the Palisades plant. Deer in Water is frustrated about local residents having to serve as 'guinea pigs.'
SMRs are small reactors designed to be factory-assembled. Supporters argue SMRs are inherently safer due to their size and recent advancements in passive nuclear safety features, but none have been built commercially in North America.
'They needed to do more to engage the Indigenous communities,' Deer in Water said.
According to Deer in Water, there are burial sites and sacred sites on the Palisades land. He considers the possible consequences of restarting the plant's operations to be 'tragic,' claiming the Indigenous community has deep cultural ties to the land.
An archaeological survey conducted last year and commissioned by Holtec found no burial places, but three archaeological sites were unearthed: a 20th century building and a temporary tool-making camp and an isolated tool fragment from pre-Columbian American Indians.
Can other shuttered plants return?
With Palisades remaining on schedule for a restart this fall and nuclear power enjoying a moment of popular approval and high investment, many in the private and public sectors are eyeing other potential nuclear restarts — but opportunities for short turnarounds are scarce.
'It really comes down to the state of the mothballing that's done in the decommissioning work,' said Brian Wirth, head of the University of Tennessee's Department of Nuclear Engineering. 'The moment you make any significant penetrations in the pressure vessel, you're done, because that's the one component that you can't replace easily.'
Once the pressure vessel is penetrated, operators have little to no financial savings from a restart over constructing a new reactor.
Stein said that leaves Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island and Iowa's Duane Arnold as the two near-term restart contenders.
'Indian Point [Energy Center in New York], within a year of shutting down, they cut a gigantic hole in the side of the container. That would be very expensive to repair. Whereas Three-Mile Island was a safe store. It was kept essentially packed and monitored for issues for a long period of time,' Stein said.
Adding to the prospects for Three Mile Island, which was recently rebranded as the Crane Clean Energy Center, is the financial backing of Microsoft. In September, the tech giant signed a 20-year power supply agreement with operator Constellation Energy.
Soon, Three Mile Island, Duane Arnold, and other closed plants will have a model to follow.
'[Palisades] will set the precedent across the globe for restarting old-aged, shut-down reactors,' said Deer in Water.