Re-Animating a Nuclear Plant Would be a First. There are Challenges.

Wall Street Journal:

The federal government and the state of Michigan are spending nearly $2 billion to restart the reactor on the shores of Lake Michigan. When it reopens, Palisades will become the first decommissioned nuclear plant anywhere to be put back to work. 

Driving the rethink: soaring demand for electricity from AI server farms, and billions on offer in state and federal loans and tax subsidies for nuclear energy in infrastructure and green power investment programs. Data centers alone are projected to account for 8% of U.S. electricity demand by 2030, up from around 3% in 2022, according to an April report by Goldman Sachs. 

For years, it’s been cheaper to generate electricity with natural gas, and big sections of the public have been uncomfortable with nuclear power, after devastating accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan. 

That feeling has shifted, with a revived understanding of nuclear energy as green power that could add to renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. Nuclear-produced electricity is also seen as more consistent than wind or solar. 
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Utilities have asked regulators to extend the licenses of 14 aging reactors in the past year. Nearly all of the nation’s 94 operating reactors have already had their licenses extended once, to 60 years, and two have been extended to 80 years—twice as long as the original licenses.
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I’m choosing neutrality in this issue.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has been a staunch friend and indispensable ally of clean energy with strong initiatives encouraging solar, wind and battery storage, is also a proponent of restarting the mothballed Palisades Nuclear reactor – profiled in this week’s Wall Street Journal, above.

Counterproductive for greenies to form a circular firing squad, and I certainly don’t have the bandwidth for it. I tell my pro-nuclear friends that, since a restart process will take years, (assuming the never-before-attempted process is even do-able) – join me today in helping site solar, wind and batteries – because there is no scenario for decarbonizing that does not include a lot of those. I tell my anti-nuclear friends, that solar, wind and batteries are, at least for now, cheaper than nuclear, help me encourage siting more of those, and we may find out they simply out-compete future nuclear builds.
Worth noting as well, that I consider Enhanced Geothermal to be a dark horse here that may very well make nuclear obsolete by the 2030s.

And I tell everyone, that if we’re going to build new nuclear, or revamp old nuclear, we should go in with eyes open, because there are grave and legit challenges that will have to be met and managed. By all means, if you can, build nuclear, but be aware that it hasn’t been hobbled by protesting hippies so much as real economic and engineering foulups and snafus.  

There are still some available accounts of the troubled history of the Palisades nuclear plant that are very much worth keeping in mind for anyone working on re-animating it.

At one point, the utility that ordered the plant built sued the builder/contractor, asserting in their filing that the poor construction practices had rendered the plant “a dangerous instrumentality”, as one attorney told me.

M Live:

Forty years ago, Consumers Power Co. filed a $300 million lawsuit against Bechtel Power Corp. and four other companies, charging them with delivering “defective equipment.”

At the time, it was the largest lawsuit ever filed by a utility against its suppliers, according to news reports.

The “defective equipment” in question belonged to what was at the time Michigan’s newest and biggest nuclear power plant: Palisades.

The plant near South Haven opened on New Year’s Eve in 1971 — more than a year later than scheduled — and suffered its first radioactive leak 13 months later, when tubes in the steam generator sprung pinhole leaks, causing the plant to be shut down. It was an inauspicious start to what had been heralded as an economic windfall for Southwest Michigan.

In August 1973, more leaks in the steam generator, as well as other issues, caused the Atomic Energy Commission, which is now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to shut down Palisades for 19 months. In 1974, Consumers ultimately replaced 27,000 tubes in the steam generator.

The same year, Consumers sued the builders of the plant. The companies reached an out-of-court settlement, with Bechtel reportedly paying Consumers $14 million.

But by its third anniversary, the nuclear plant had been tagged with the label “controversial,” which has stuck persistently over the past four decades.

Located along Lake Michigan, about five miles south of South Haven, Palisades is Michigan’s oldest operating nuclear power plant and the eighth-oldest in the United States. The approximately 790-megawatt pressurized water reactor supplies an estimated 20 percent of the power to Southwest Michigan.

Palisades’ creation was announced in the mid-1960s amid a burst of optimism and enthusiasm for what was being heralded as the clean energy of the future. Reports at the time called it a $100 million investment in Michigan’s future and said that the “fairy godmother” had come to Van Buren County.

In fact, Van Buren State Park nearby was created so that the tourists who were expected to flock to Palisades would have somewhere to picnic after touring the nuclear power plant, which was built with a now-closed observation deck.

The first year of operation proved uneventful. But then there were three shutdowns in 1973 — with the final starting in August of that year and lasting until March 1975.

In 1979, the NRC fined Palisades $450,000 — with the regulatory body and the plant ultimately settling for $225,000, the largest single fine the plant has paid. The NRC had issued at least $574,000 in fines to Palisades by 2001. (By way of comparison, the largest fine the NRC has ever issued is the $5.45 million it slapped the Davis-Besse plant with in 2005 for severe damage to its reactor vessel.)

In 2004, the NRC installed an alternative dispute resolution process with outside mediation, which plant operators can request.

Shutdowns remained common in the early years of operation of the plant — many because of the steam generators, which were replaced in 1990. At that time, a Kalamazoo Gazette article said Palisades had “one of the worst on-line records in the nuclear power industry.” As of June 1990, the Gazette reported, Palisades had been running at less than 50 percent of its capacity since its opening.

The years 1993 and ’94 marked a particularly troubled time for the plant. During a refueling shutdown in June 1993, workers discovered a broken fuel rod and leaking pipes and valves, causing the plant to remain shut down until November. Some of the radioactive fuel from the rod spilled out on the floor of the reactor, the Associated Press reported at the time.

The NRC reacted with a series of fines and a special investigation: It fined Consumers $50,000 for the control-rod incident in 1993. In 1994, it issued another $50,000 fine for an electrical design problem at the plant, $50,000 for design problems in a cooling system, as well as another $25,000 fine for failure to protect vital security information.

That same month, the general manager was relieved of his duties and the vice president of operations resigned in a management shake-up.

In March of that year, the NRC launched a high-level probe of the plant and subsequently issued a report that said Palisades operations in 1993 showed poor communications, an inability to identify and fix mechanical and other problems, a staff that didn’t fully understand its responsibilities and a management that denied there was a problem.

Nearly 20 years later, the NRC would echo those concerns in regard to the safety culture under Palisades’ new owner.

The next flurry of news came in 2007, when Entergy Corp., the second-largest nuclear operator in the U.S., purchased Palisades for $380 million from Consumers. As part of the deal, Consumers agreed to purchase any electricity generated by Palisades for the next 15 years. That same year, the NRC renewed the plant’s operating license for 20 years, through 2031.

That year, several incidents occurred, including the head of security resigning after it was discovered he had fabricated his credentials. Then in December, tritium was found in a test well at levels above the Environmental Protection Agency’s limits for drinking water. (No one was drinking the water in question and it did not escape into Lake Michigan, the NRC said.) The tritium was traced to corrosion in the underground pipes — a common problem at older reactors.

The years 2011 and 2012 saw a series of troubling incidents that led to the NRC downgrading Palisades to Column 3, classifying it as among the worst-performing reactors in the U.S. Plants placed in Column 4 receive the most attention and plants in Column 5 are permanently shut down.

In 2011, there were five shutdowns at Palisades — two of which prompted special investigations by the NRC and one of which led to a “yellow” finding of substantial significance to safety.

In late 2012, after it said improvements had been made, the NRC moved Palisades back to the list of top-performing reactors — although it still recommended an extra 1,000 hours of inspections in 2013. And federal regulators in June found that Palisades operated safely in 2013.