Governor Gretchen Whitmer Announces Plan to Reopen the 50 Year Old Closed Palisades Nuclear Plant.

[NNadir]

From the local Michigan News (Holland Sentinel): In surprise move, Whitmer announces plan to reopen shuttered Palisades nuclear plant.

by Michael Boatman September 9, 2022.

An excerpt:

SOUTH HAVEN — Just months after it was shut down — after months of attempts to keep it open — a plan to reopen the Palisades Nuclear Facility in South Haven was announced Friday.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy on Friday, Sept. 9, supporting Holtec International’s application for a grant that would reopen the plant. New Jersey-based Holtec International purchased the plant from Entergy in June.

The Palisades Power Plant in Covert, which was shutdown in May. A plan to "save" the plant was announced Friday, Sept. 9.
The company has applied for a federal grant under the Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) program to restore operations at the plant. The state says reopening the plant will “protect 600 high-paying jobs,” as well as 1,100 additional jobs throughout the community. It is also intended to shore up clean energy production in Michigan.

Holtec submitted its application to the CNC on July 5, which was the deadline for applications. If Holtec is approved for a CNC, the state says it is “ready to support them by identifying state funding and facilitating a power purchase agreement...”

From a trade magazine: Michigan Governor Urges DOE to Support Palisades Nuclear Plant’s Reopening

by Sonia Patel Power September 12, 2022

Michigan’s governor has asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to support Holtec International’s efforts to “save” the 800-MW Palisades nuclear power plant, marking a potential turnaround for the facility in Southwest Michigan, which was taken offline for the final time on May 20, 2022, after 50 years of operation.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s in a Sept. 9 letter asked DOE Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to support Holtec’s plans “to repower and reopen” Palisades, a single pressurized water reactor in Covert, Michigan, that had operated since 1971. The plant’s closure in May by its former operator, Entergy Nuclear, was widely lamented by the nuclear industry and environmental groups. While Entergy said it believes nuclear power will be essential to the nation’s goal of mitigating the impact of climate change, the company closed the plant as part of a bigger strategic plan for the company to exit the merchant nuclear generation and focus its utility operations in the Gulf South.

State efforts to save the plant, which employed 600 workers while operational, have continued, however. “Keeping Palisades open is critical for Michigan’s competitiveness and future economic development opportunities,” the governor wrote on Friday. “We are ready to do our part should they receive funding through the [Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC)] program, including identifying state funding and facilitating a power purchase agreement...”

From World Nuclear News:

Michigan governor calls for nuclear plant to reopen

Subtitle:

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer pledged the state's support for Holtec International's application for a federal grant to save the Palisades nuclear power plant which closed in May.

Entergy's closure of the 805 MWe pressurised water reactor after more than 50 years of operation was timed to coincide with the expiration of a 15-year power purchase agreement with Consumers Energy. In June, Palisades was purchased by Holtec International for decommissioning. According to Whitmer, Holtec submitted an application for funding under the Department of Energy's Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) programme on 5 July, just days after completing its acquisition of the plant.

Whitmer has now pledged the state's support for Holtec's application in a letter to US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who is herself a former governor of Michigan. In her letter, Whitmer says keeping Palisades open is a top priority for the state: "I will do everything I can to keep this plant open, protect jobs, increase Michigan's competitiveness, lower costs, and expand clean energy production. We know the path ahead is not easy, but we are not going to let that stop us from fighting for economic opportunity for Southwest Michigan and reliable, clean energy for the state. Just because something's never been done before does not mean it cannot be done in Michigan."

The USD6 billion CNC programme is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden in November 2021 and aims to address the issue of existing nuclear power plants which are threatened with early closure for economic reasons, where such closures will lead to a rise in air pollutants and carbon emissions.

"I want to underscore that Michigan remains committed to supporting Holtec's efforts at Palisades," Whitmer said in her letter to Granholm. "We are ready to do our part should they receive funding through the CNC programme, including identifying state funding and facilitating a power purchase agreement."

Palisades was removed from service by Entergy on 20 May, and defuelled by 10 June. Holtec's acquisition of the plant - together with the decommissioned Big Rock Point nuclear power plant, where a dry fuel storage facility remains - was completed later that month. Holtec has previously said it plans to move the fuel from Palisades' spent fuel pool to dry cask storage over the next three years and complete decommissioning of the plant (with the exception of the dry storage facility) by 2041...

The reason I am a Democrat is basically connected with my view of human rights, in particular the rights of women, my abhorrence of racism, my concern for the impoverished (a far less fashionable focus in our party than it used to be), but most importantly my view that we owe future generations a sustainable world, a task at which my now dying generation has failed miserably and for which history will not forgive us.

In this last category after many years of careful and deep study, some of which took place as I researched on line writings here and elsewhere, I have been deeply disturbed by the large anti-nuclear wing of our party since I have drawn the conclusion that opposition to nuclear power kills people. Moreover, I have a very low opinion of so called "renewable energy" which is both reactionary and unsustainable. I am fully aware that this makes me something of an outlier in our party. I have always described my dissatisfaction with my party on this score to be analogous to what an otherwise sensible "small government," low tax Republican of the old school (before the party went totally insane) might have felt when confronted with creationism and other aspects of religious fundamentalism. More recently I have compared anti-nukes to anti-vaxxers.

The realities of climate change are before us, and the precariousness of power systems dependent on the wind blowing and the sun shining, in Texas, in California, and most notably in Europe, particularly Germany are drawing the insufficiencies of this approach starkly. These systems are almost always backed up by redundant dangerous fossil fuel powered systems in almost every case despite dangerous and dubious enthusiasm for batteries and hydrogen that more or less remains in never-never land.

The recent support of Gavin Newsome and Gretchen Whitmer - not to mention Joe Biden and Secretary Granholm - for nuclear energy is thus a welcome change for me.

Perhaps the time will come when more Democrats will recognize the profound flaws and environmentally dubious nature of so called "renewable energy," but for now, I'll take what I can get. Protecting valuable working nuclear resources is enough, for now. Subsidizing so called "renewable energy" is an economically unsound idea since it values unreliable energy over reliable energy and allows unreliable energy to impact the economics of energy that works with high capacity utilization and low carbon emissions, of which there is only one form, nuclear energy.

We do, however, need to go far further, in particular, we have to rebuild our destroyed nuclear manufacturing infrastructure, if I may say, "build back better," to use a phrase coined by a rather prominent old man with remarkable and surprisingly youthful energy to do good.

This is a critical issue, pun intended.

Have a nice evening.

[yourout]

1. I support nuclear power on one condition...

Primary coolant can NOT be aersolized which means no water.
Molten salts or some other cooling media that can not spread more than a few football fields no matter what.

[NNadir]

2. That's pretty funny, because I am highly recommending to my son something quite the opposite.

My son is pursing a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering with a materials science focus.

I rather like a radioactive gas phase, since it can do what no other system can do, clean the air of recalcitrant pollutants, the impact of which is increasing rather rapidly.

[hauckeye]

3. That plant is right on Lake Michigan

We used to go to a state park just north of it and walk down the beach to the plant's north boundary.

[NNadir]

4. That's a good place for it, given the fact that its a Rankine cycle plant.

We can certainly build plants less dependent on water, even plants that clean up waste water in use, but as this is an old plant design, based on 1960's technology, it needed to be where it is.