Holtec International says efforts to restart the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant in Covert Township are now entering the final milestone phase, with major repair and inspection work largely complete.
Holtec spokesperson Nick Culp tells us crews are finishing maintenance activities and returning systems and equipment to an operational-ready state.
“One of our most recent major milestones was we put the reactor head back onto the reactor,” Culp said. “So after the repair work was completed, we lifted the 250,000 pound reactor head, placed it back on the reactor vessel. There is no fuel in the reactor. What we are doing now is we’re preparing the entire primary system, which includes the reactor itself, for system passivation. Passivation is really just a matter of applying a passive protective coating inside of the equipment.”
So, what happens after that?
“Once we get through system passivation, we’ll start going through our plant restart modes. There’s six different modes you go through, and the first one is really preparing the plant to load fuel. So passivation will be done. We’ll take the head back off of the reactor, and then we’re going to be in a place where we can begin refueling the reactor.”
Culp says the company is not setting a firm restart date because the timeline is being driven by testing and inspections to meet federal and industry standards.
“We need to make sure that all plant systems and equipment are ready to go. So we’re being very diligent in that process. There are no shortcuts or anything like that to get through it. So we’re being very deliberate. And as we start to bring the plant back online, one of the things that we have to do is do system and equipment testing. And as we start to bring equipment back into service, and that testing is occurring and inspections are occurring. There may be additional maintenance activities we need to do that’s standard for any nuclear power plant as it comes back online. So it’s sort of things of that nature.”
Still, Culp describes the project as being in the home stretch with the restart being in the “near short term.”
More than 600 full-time employees and 1,000 contractors are currently working on site, down from a peak of more than 2,000 earlier in the project.
Culp also notes plans are well underway to construct two 340-megawatt small modular reactors on site with the help of a $400 million federal matching grant. He expects those will be online “early next decade.”
