Nuclear Monitor #930
Jan van Evert, reporter WISE-Netherlands
The Palisades nuclear power plant is located on the shores of Lake Michigan, not far from Chicago. It started production at full power (800 MW) in 1973 and was shut down in June 2022. Previous owner Entergy sold Pallisades in June 2022 to Holtec International for decommissioning as part of its strategy to exit the nuclear power sector. In September 2022,Holtec applied for funds from the Civil Nuclear Credit to reopen the plant. The Biden administration committed a $1.5 billion loan guarantee to the Palisades restart, and the Trump administration has since continued those disbursements.
Last May, Holtec cleared a major hurdle when the NRC’s (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) environmental assessment concluded there were no significant environmental impacts associated with resuming the plant’s operations. The plant transitioned from a decommissioned to an online status on August 27th. The move allows the plant to receive nuclear fuel and begin producing electricity. This would make Palisades the first nuclear power plant to restart operations in the USA. And it might very well not be the last. There are plans to restart even more reactors in the USA, including the notorious one near Harrisburg.
But at an August 21st subcommittee meeting of the NRC on Reactor Safety, engineer Arnold Gundersen, who has worked in the nuclear sector for more than fifty years, said steam generators at the Palisades plant have degraded to the point that they are unsafe, unreliable and need to be replaced, not remediated.
“Holtec wants to put a Band-Aid fix on the Palisades steam generators to hold them together. But Band-Aids are useless since the steam generators are gangrenous. A complete steam generator replacement is necessary,” he said. Never have I been more concerned about the safety of a nuclear plant than I am about the planned ‘resurrection’ of Palisades.”
Kevin Kamps, a spokesman of watchdog group Beyond Nuclear said in an interview: “We fear (…) steam generator tube failure that can lead to catastrophic core meltdown.” Beyond Nuclear contested the plan at virtually every step of the vetting process and now “fully intends to appeal to the federal courts”, Kamps said. In December 2023, Holtec International announced that it intended to build the first two of its SMR-300 small modular reactors at Palisades by mid-2030.
sources:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/mothballed-nuclear-plant-on-brink-of-revival
https://www.enr.com/articles/61243-palisades-nuclear-plant-moves-closer-to-restart-by-end-of-2025
Wikipedia
