Dive Brief:

• Holtec International’s efforts to restart the 800-MW Palisades nuclear power plant pose “no significant impact” to the human environment, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Friday.
• The official notice of NRC’s finding removes a potential roadblock to what is expected to be the first recommissioning of a retired nuclear reactor in the United States later this year. NRC issued a draft finding of no significant impact, or FONSI, for the western Michigan plant in January, prompting a challenge from local and national anti-nuclear groups.
• “Pending all federal reviews and approvals, our restart project is on track and on budget to bring Palisades back online by the fourth quarter of the year,” Nick Culp, Holtec’s senior manager of government affairs and communications, said in an email.

Dive Insight:

The FONSI is a “major milestone on our regulatory path to reauthorize plant operations,” Culp added.

NRC continues to review other aspects of the Palisades restart process, including a request to approve Holtec’s method for repairing an onsite steam generator system that NRC said last year showed wear that “far exceeded estimates based on previous operating history.”

The wear may have been caused by shutdown crews not following protocol while laying up the plant in 2022, Holtec spokesperson Pat O’Brien told Reuters in October.

NRC’s review timeline has slipped since March, when the commission said it would rule on outstanding licensing matters by July 31. Its website now shows an estimated completion date of Sept. 30 for the steam generator review, the last item on its docket. 

But Holtec’s own estimates of when Palisades could power back up have not changed significantly from the October 2025 target O’Brien gave Utility Dive last September.

Unlike many clean energy projects that received financial commitments from the Biden administration, the Palisades restart appears to have the full support of the Trump administration. 

Despite losing up to half its staff since January, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office has thus far made at least three loan disbursements to Holtec out of a $1.5 billion loan guarantee, complementing a roughly $1.3 billion U.S. Department of Agriculture award to two regional electric cooperatives to support power purchases from the plant. Michigan’s 2025 state budget includes $300 million in funding for the plant.

Holtec could spend as much as $500 million of its own money on the restart, O’Brien told Utility Dive last year. The company plans to apply for a 20-year renewal of the reactor’s operating license, potentially extending its operations until 2051, and aims to commission two 300-MW small modular reactors on the site in the early 2030s.

Former owner Entergy permanently shut down Palisades in May 2022 and sold it to Holtec the following month. Holtec made the first public moves toward restarting the plant in late 2023, marking the first U.S. effort to restart a retiring commercial power reactor.

Since then, the owners of two other recently-shuttered U.S. nuclear power plants have moved to restart them. 

Backed by a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft, Constellation Energy said in September it will restart the undamaged 835-MW reactor at Three Mile Island — now called the Crane Clean Energy Center — by 2028. And NextEra Energy has taken preliminary steps to restart the 600-MW reactor at its Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which shuttered in 2020.