From demolished to reopened: US$1.5 billion loan granted for the reactivation of the Palisades nuclear plant
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Lending Programs on March 27 offered Holtec Palisades LLC a conditional loan guarantee of up to $1.52 billion for its first-in-history nuclear power plant restart project. of Palisades by Holtec, a nuclear sector services company which, until yesterday, dealt with the decommissioning of power plants, but which will now take care of their restart.
The 800 MW Palisades plant, located on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, ceased operations in May 2022 and was acquired from former owner Entergy Nuclear by Holtec the following month, with the goal of ultimately decommissioning it.
It was one of several aging plants being demolished over the last decade as they reached the end of their useful lives or could not compete with lower-cost natural gas plants, with industry companies using pre-established trust funds to finance the closures.
However, with a view to net zero, Holtec and the Government of Michigan, Gretchen Whitme, announced their intention to reopen the plant during the year. Michigan officials have already allocated $150 million to restart the plant.
Last year, the company began the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and process to reauthorize energy operations at the plant. The company also plans to use the site for the first two small modular reactor units that could potentially double the site's capacity, although DOE officials said this work cannot be financed under the announced loan guarantee recently and will have to find new investors.
Holtec has already reached multi-year power purchase agreements with a pair of nonprofit rural electric cooperatives, Wolverine Power Cooperative and Hoosier Energy, to sell Palisades' electric generation.
“The repowering of Palisades will restore secure generation, around the clock, for hundreds of thousands of families, businesses and manufacturers,” Kris Singh, Holtec President and CEO, said in a statement. “It also delivers the environmental and public health benefits of an emissions-free generation, hundreds of high-paying local jobs with a large union workforce, the economic growth and social benefits of a strong community partner.”
The project is the first to be offered a conditional commitment through the DOE's Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, funded by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which focuses on projects that repurpose shuttered energy infrastructure or that enable energy infrastructure to reduce pollution atmospheric.
Reopening the Palisades plant is expected to avoid 4.47 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year over its projected 25 years of operation, according to the DOE. Furthermore, the experimentation of reopening abandoned plants also opens up new prospects for other sites both in the USA and in other areas of the world. This type of business is much simpler than a new opening, because it does not require complex concessions or be punished by the NIMBY policies of local communities, because the plant is already on site.
The Biden administration has turned to nuclear energy as a source to help meet its goals of a 100% clean power grid by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by 2050. As previously reported by ENR Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said the United States must add 200 GW of nuclear power to meet the COP28 climate change summit's goal of tripling nuclear capacity as part of efforts to phase out the use of the fuels fossils.
“Nuclear energy is our largest source of carbon-free electricity,” Granholm said in a statement.
Working to achieve these goals, the nuclear industry has sought to extend the operational life of existing nuclear power plants, such as Diablo Canyon in California, and to use small modular reactors to expand the capacity of existing nuclear sites.
Because the plant's infrastructure largely already exists, DOE officials say the project would not involve major construction. But the site would still need to renovate, rebuild and replace existing equipment, as well as inspections and testing.
Holtec expects to file the remainder of the necessary NRC license applications for Palisades this spring. The company said the plant could be restarted by the end of 2025, pending approvals, and aims to have the first small modular reactor operational by mid-2030.
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The article From demolished to reopened: 1.5 billion USD loan granted for the reactivation of the Palisades nuclear plant comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/da-demolito-a-riaperto-concesso-prestito-da-15-miliardi-di-usd-per-la-riattivazione-dellimpainto-nucleare-di-palisades-1/ on Fri, 29 Mar 2024 10:00:45 +0000.