Biden Administration closes deal on $1.52B loan for Palisades restart effort

[Yard sign design by Michigan Safe Energy Future-Kalamazoo Chapter, and Shut Down Palisades Campaign; photo by Kevin Kamps]

As reported by Tom Henry in the Toledo Blade.

The article quotes a former engineering director at Palisades under the previous owner, Entergy:

But Alan Blind, who was the engineering director at Palisades from May of 2006 through February of 2013 when it was owned by Entergy, labeled the project “a dangerous precedent in regulatory evasion” in the subject line of an email to national and regional journalists.

He said that petitions he has filed with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission on behalf of residents who live near Palisades do not call for an outright halt of the restart effort.

“Instead, we highlight critical gaps in Holtec’s use of NRC regulations, compounded by what appears to be the NRC’s ‘implied’ approval of these actions,” Mr. Blind said. “These gaps raise significant safety and regulatory concerns that must be addressed before any restart can proceed.”

One of the more recent issues he has focused on from an engineering standpoint has been the discovery of flaws in steam generator tubes. The flaws were made public in late September by the NRC.

In addition to the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) $1.52 billion loan guarantee, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also recently announced a $1.3 billion grant to support Holtec International’s unprecedented, unneeded restart of the Palisades zombie reactor.

Along with the State of Michigan’s Palisades restart grant of $300 million, that amounts to a total of $3.1 billion of federal and state taxpayer bailouts for the restart, and counting.

Holtec has requested more than $8 billion in bailouts from taxpayers and ratepayers for the restart. Holtec has requested another $7.4 billion in DOE loan guarantees for so-called “Small Modular Reactor” (SMR) design certification, construction, and operation, including for two SMR-300s (300 Megawatts-electric each) at the Palisades site itself, and yet more at Palisades’ sibling closed (and decommissioned, but still radioactively contaminated) nuclear power plant site — Big Rock Point — in Hayes Township, MI near Charlevoix.

See Beyond Nuclear’s breakdown of bailouts at Palisades and Big Rock Point, as well as Beyond Nuclear’s related posts about the zombie reactor restart and SMR new build nightmare schemes on the Lake Michigan shore, since they were first floated in April 2022.