New Trend: Trying to Restart Retired Reactors

A Sign of the Nuclear Industry’s Health, and Weakness

By Matthew L. Wald

Policy is fickle, and villains become heroes: Swamps are now “wetlands,” stinging insects are rebranded as “pollinators,” old junk becomes “vintage.” And suddenly, nuclear reactors unloved and unplugged just four or five years ago because they made a kilowatt-hour of electricity for a fraction of a penny more than natural gas plants, are lately seen as worthy of rescue.

The lead case is the Palisades nuclear plant, in Michigan. The company that was hired to tear Palisades down is now trying to relicense it, with strong local support and a loan of $1.5 billion from the Department of Energy.

A restart raises some novel licensing and logistical questions. And nobody in the nuclear industry wants to be the first to spring a new idea on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but with clean air advocates seeing the progress in Michigan, there is now talk of reviving two more.

The nuclear restart trend signals two things. First, that the popularity of nuclear power as a clean energy source is growing. And second, that the nuclear industry is responding to that popularity growth by reviving old technology rather than building something new.

Among the challenges of  reopening a closed nuclear plant is hiring qualified staff. When a plant shuts down, the organization that is decommissioning it will keep some staff on hand, but lay off most workers. For specialized nuclear work, ZipRecruiter and Indeed won’t do the trick. Control room operators need a license for a single reactor, or possibly two if it’s a twin-unit plant. They take a qualifying exam specific to that reactor, and utilities plan far ahead, bringing on classes of new operators in anticipation of retirement of older staff.

The license for the reactor itself isn’t a piece of paper. It’s hundreds or thousands of pages of technical specifications, laying out inspection intervals and test procedures, to ensure continuous operability. Before restart, the condition of all those components must be demonstrated. And older reactors, even the ones that have been operating continuously, must have a program to manage their aging structures and components, usually with enhanced surveillance and testing techniques. Plants scheduled for retirement but still operating are rigorously inspected, but their owners often skip upgrades and improvements that would typically be made for  plants intended to remain operational. Hence they have investment backlogs as well as maintenance backlogs.

In addition, owners have to procure fuel, a multi-month process, and they must line up customers for the electricity.

Palisades was retired in May 2022, but Holtec International, which had agreed to buy it to decommission it, reconsidered after the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act became law in November 2021. In the fall of 2022, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan wrote to the energy department to support reopening.

For years the nuclear industry had argued that reactors should be kept open, even if they temporarily became uncompetitive, because once closed they could not be restarted. But the Palisades effort could inspire others. That would fit into a pattern in the nuclear industry: Just as first-of-a-kind construction is hard, so is first-of-a-kind regulatory approval. But once one plant clears a hurdle, others find it easier to follow. One prominent example is getting a 20-year extension on an operating license, from 40 years to 60, and then from 60 to 80. After a slow start, nearly all the reactors still operating have been through the procedure, with the operators and the regulators in a fixed pattern of well-understood expectations. 

Another example is “power uprates,” which means getting more energy out of a plant by upgrading the steam turbine, or improving the ability to move heat from the reactor, or similar steps. The industry has added more than 8,000 megawatts of capacity over the years, and could add five more. Again, the utility industry is focused on legacy plants, not new ones. 

As with uprates and license extensions, there could be a pattern of raising reactors from the dead. Now, there are reports of efforts to reopen Iowa’s Duane Arnold, closed in August 2020, and Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island unit 1, closed in September 2019. (Unit 2 had a partial core melt-down in 1979, but Unit 1 was a reliable performer.) In both cases, what motivates reopening is the idea that total demand for electricity is going to start growing again, after a long period of stagnation. Data centers, electric cars and heat pumps are all factors in this growth prediction

The CEO of NextERA, which owns Duane Arnold, said that he would consider reopening the plant, in response to inquiries from companies looking to build data centers in Iowa. Google, which has a long and unsuccessful history of trying to go carbon-neutral, is considering a big data center nearby. In the case of Three Mile Island, Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, stated it was in talks with the Pennsylvania governor’s office.

But as Dan Yurman, a nuclear blogger, points out, these may both be long shots.

To quote Yogi Berra out of context, “predictions are hard, especially about the future.” There was a time when Diablo Canyon seemed certain to die; in the summer of 2022, California passed a law allowing the two units to continue until October 2029 and October 2030, respectively, and the door seems open to many more years. The state legislature recently approved a $400 million loan to keep the plant running.

If the idea of re-opening retired reactors is even under consideration, it points to a changed attitude toward nuclear power and renewable energy. An Iowa news article talked optimistically about a feasibility study for reopening what was the state’s only reactor and called the shutdown “a blunder.” Nuclear plants have always been popular with their immediate neighbors, partly because they provide jobs and tax revenues, but national polling data indicates growing acceptance among a wider audience.

Equally, faith in an all-renewable energy solution is declining. Pennsylvania is struggling to add solar and wind. The state is a traditional energy exporter, but mostly from coal. It has a replacement ready: gas from fracking. Pennsylvania is the nation’s second-largest gas producer, behind Texas. But that will not get Pennsylvania to zero carbon. And in 2022, the state got only 4 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, including hydro. It has ambitious targets for renewable energy but uncertain prospects for reaching them.

Michigan has an extremely aggressive plan for adding renewables, but local analysts point out that proposed wind and solar “farms” face local opposition and that the state’s transmission system isn’t up to the job.

It is also worrisome that a high-tech industry may be responding to renewed demand for its product by rehabilitating old factories rather than by building new ones. While the electricity market is  crying out for additional nuclear energy, the industry isn’t ready for mass deployment. The country’s decades-long gap in nuclear deployments has left the industry without a proven design to offer. Restarting Palisades, which is 53 years old, is seen as a cheaper, lower-risk enterprise than building an advanced reactor from scratch. It is also seen as faster, despite the fact that restart is probably a process of at least three years.

Even more worrisome than the perception is the possibility that it might be true. American industry has a generally poor record in building first-of-a-kind projects, and the recent completion of the Vogtle reactors in Georgia puts nuclear front-and-center in demonstrating the phenomenon.  The two new reactors there took 15 years to build instead of eight, and cost about $31 billion, around $17 billion over budget. That track record gives pause to other utilities.

Ironically, Vogtle’s costs ran up partly because it was designed for quick and efficient constructability. Much of the work was done off site, with fabrication of large modules that could be lowered into place mostly completed. That technique may eventually make for smoother construction but in the first iteration, it failed.

Meanwhile, energy technologies with more frequent product cycles—including gas turbines, wind turbines, and especially oil and gas drilling—have been able to evolve, making small improvements in each iteration, improving their costs and schedules and adding investor confidence about both. Nuclear could follow suit with multiple small modular reactors, but it isn’t there yet. The first advanced reactors won’t start up until at least 2030, and it would take three to five copies before a reactor model could move from “first-of-a-kind” or early version into a mature product with an optimized construction cost and schedule.  

That is not to say that new nuclear is off the table. Holtec, which is best known for decommissioning old plants but also manufactures heat exchangers for existing reactors, intends to license its own Small Modular Reactor design. The company plans to build copies of these reactors at Palisades and at a decommissioned nuclear reactor in Oyster Creek, New Jersey. TerraPower recently broke ground on an advanced reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, and is seeking licensing from the NRC, and X-energy and Dow will start one soon in Texas, and has plans for a dozen more.  

Focusing on retired reactors denies the energy system the benefits of new designs. One of those is safety. This is not often articulated by the utility industry, which does not want to make current-generation models look bad by comparison. But new designs, with lower pressures, and reliance on natural forces to dissipate heat if the regular cooling system malfunctions, will cut the risk of an accident with offsite consequences, already infinitesimal, to a tenth of infinitesimal. And new designs have features that the old workhorses do not: the ability to operate flexibly, to fit in to a grid heavy with intermittent wind and solar, and the ability to produce much higher-temperature heat, which can substitute for carbon-based fuels, not only in electricity production but also in industry.

Restarting a fifty-something-year-old reactor may give years of additional clean energy. But nothing lasts forever, and eventually those machines will wear out. It’s time for a new generation.