The U.S. Department of Energy has conditionally approved a $1.5 billion loan to Holtec International to restart the Palisades nuclear power plant in Van Buren County. So, what’s next?
We asked Holtec’s Patrick O’Brien.
“There’ll be a process where we continue to work with the DOE loan program to finalize and close that loan,” O’Brien said. “In the short term, that’s kind of, from a DOE perspective, what we’ll be working on. But we’ll continue, really, with the key path of continuing to work with the NRC to go through the licensing actions needed.”
O’Brien says Holtec has already started to rehire the 600 workers that will be needed to run the plant with about 300 on site now. Some of the employees are previous Palisades employees who just retired when the plant closed, while others are moving back to southwest Michigan.
There’s a rigorous process that will need to be followed as the plant reopening gets closer.
“Similarly, when we were an operating plant, you would have a planned maintenance outages. We’re going to go through all the systems, safety systems, things along those lines, and we’ll ensure that they’re in tip-top shape before we look to restart.”
O’Brien says the goal is to have Palisades operating by late next year. There are also plans to construct two small modular reactors at the site, which will require yet more employees when brought online.
O’Brien says this is historic as no other nuclear plant has been brought back to life in this fashion, creating an example for how it can be done.
