Federal nuclear regulators expressed concerns Tuesday on what they called a “very, very demanding” timeline by Holtec International to reopen the Palisades nuclear plant in southwest Michigan by this fall.
The comments from staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission came during a meeting in Maryland that was broadcast online.
Holtec representatives were there to explain two amendments they want to make to a license that they hope to use to reopen the nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan. The Palisades plant stopped operating in 2022. If it reopens, it would be the first shuttered nuclear plant to ever reopen in the U.S.
Holtec has said it wants to restart operations by the fourth quarter of this year, and they’ve asked the NRC to approve the license amendments by August 15.
“This is a very aggressive schedule,” said NRC branch chief Stephen Bloom at Tuesday’s meeting.
An NRC engineer, Eric Reichelt, called the timeline “very, very demanding,” and said only a few NRC staff were available to do the kind of work the license amendment requests required.
The requests for two license amendments from Holtec come as part of the broader regulatory review of the plan to reopen the plant. The two additional amendment requests came after Holtec discovered more than 1,000 damaged steam generator tubes at the plant during inspections that concluded last September.
The cracked steam generator tubes represent the most significant technical challenge disclosed so far in the process.
Tuesday, representatives from Holtec explained their plans to repair the tubes using a strategy known as “sleeving” in which the tubes are essentially coated with another material to cover up the cracked areas.
Staff at the NRC explained that sleeving has been used as a solution thousands of times in nuclear plants around the world.
But a number of members of the public who called into Tuesday’s meeting questioned whether the strategy would ultimately work to solve the problems in a steam generator system at Palisades that’s more than 30 years old, and that sat idle for the past two years, possibly adding to corrosion in the tubes.
Palisades has two steam generators, both of which were put into operation in the early 1990s, according to NRC documents. Steam generators take water that’s been heated by the nuclear reactor vessel in the plant, and use that heat to boil water, generating steam that’s ultimately converted into electric energy.
Some people who called into Tuesday’s meeting suggested Palisades’ aging steam generator system needed more than just tube repairs.
“Sleeving … prioritizes short-term savings over long-term safety and reliability,” said Kraig Schultz, who lives in Southwest Michigan and is a member of the group Michigan Safe Energy Future.
Schultz and others said they believed the ultimate problem is not with the tubes, but the aging steam generators themselves. They suggested Holtec is avoiding replacing the whole system because doing so would be too costly, and take too much time.
A Holtec spokesperson said Tuesday that the steam generators at Palisades were inspected, and the company has no plans to replace them at this time.
“We are not pursuing replacement of the steam generators as we will be applying an industry-proven repair method to ensure the generators can return to service and maintain safe and reliable plant operations,” said Holtec spokesperson Nick Culp.
NRC staff at the meeting said they haven’t drawn any conclusions yet on the repair plans, and questioned whether replacing the two steam generators would be a better option than sleeving alone.
“Our expectation is that with sleeving you would maintain the same safety reliability,” said Paul Klein, a senior materials engineer at the NRC. “It’s also possible with a new steam generator to get into issues. So just replacing the steam generators doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be any steam generator tube-related issues.”
Regulators will have at least six months to review the plans and issue a decision, assuming they stick to the timeline Holtec requested in the meeting.
Klein and others from the NRC warned that if the materials from Holtec were lacking at all, it could delay decisions, which ultimately could put the restart timeline at risk.
The NRC has said it intends to issue decisions on other licensing requests for the project by the end of July.
But staff at Tuesday’s meeting said they would be thorough in their work, and the outcome of the licensing is not assured. And while reopening Palisades would be a historic move, they’ll analyze the safety the same as they do at any other plant that uses the same pressurized water reactor, or PWR, technology to generate power.
“We’re going to hold Holtec to the same standard as every other PWR in the United States,” Klein said. “They must demonstrate that they’re able to maintain tube integrity during the operating cycle. And if they’re able to do that, then we’ll treat Holtec the same as every other PWR, and if they can’t convince us that they can maintain tube integrity then they won’t be starting up because of that issue.”
