🔋A First For Everything
Palisades nuclear plant is one step closer to being the first nuclear plant to restart in the US.
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Longtime readers will know I don’t shy away from talking about nuclear energy. While misplaced fears about waste, weapons, and safety still loom large, the technology is emission-free and boasts great capacity factors. Take the Palisades plant in Michigan for example, which over its long 50 years of operation averaged to supply 4,600 GWh of electricity to the grid each year in an 800 MW reactor.
Holtec bought the Palisades nuclear plant in mid-2022 after it ceased operation. Last week, Holtec secured a DOE loan to finish the restoration of the facility to continue operating. At this point, the goal is to open the plant in late 2025, which would be the first nuclear plant to be re-opened in the US. It’s not all in the clear though, as the site still needs approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Committee (NRC), an organization that has seemingly not been too fond of nuclear ironically.
While the NRC has certainly not helped the nuclear industry in the US grow, new leadership is at the helm again. In addition, the sentiments on nuclear are becoming more bi-partisan. For a while, the Democrats were heavily influenced by environmentalists discarding nuclear in favor of renewables. With bills like the Atomic Energy Advancement Act passing with bi-partisan votes in the House of Representatives, the tide may be changing politically. This bill, if passed, would encourage the NRC to expedite nuclear approvals and accelerate the deployment of nuclear energy technology. Overall, loosening the grip the NRC has on the nuclear industry could be on the table soon.
Holtec also plans on building two 300 MW small module reactors (SMRs) on the site, bringing the total capacity to 1,400 MW by the mid-2030s. Small module reactors and other advanced designs have been viewed in a better light than traditional reactors in the US politically, however, their development and economic feasibility remain absent from the commercial scale. NuScale’s SMR project in Utah fell through but has seen some optimism lately with a deal to power some large data centers.
You may not know, but nuclear is consistently the US’s second largest electricity producer behind natural gas, equivalent to 18.6% of the total in 2023. The chart below, courtesy of Grid Brief, shows a snippet of a week in February. You can see how nuclear is a consistent and reliable source of power whereas wind and solar vary throughout the day/week. Coal and natural gas are typically what pick up for the draught in renewables.
Holtec’s Palisades nuclear plant is in Michigan and within the larger power market called the Midcontinent Independent System Operator or MISO for short. Miso is responsible for 15 states, but being geographically constrained, it has a different energy profile than the national aggregate.
In MISO itself, natural gas is still the largest electricity producer followed by coal. In charge of some midwest areas, the power market boasts some of the best onshore wind resources. Occasionally, wind becomes the top source, but along the way nuclear is a steady eddy. In MISO, nuclear and wind provide similar totals of energy at the end of the year even though there is more installed capacity for wind, this of course due to the capacity factor difference. It is also worth remembering nuclear plants provide extensive thermal power in addition to electric resources, which wind does not.
Nuclear and the Palisades nuclear plant are important for MISO, however small in total capacity it may be compared to the giant power market it is a part of. 732TWh of electricity was supplied to MISO in 2022. taking Palisade’s average generation of 4.6 GWh, which is 0.63% of MISO’s supplied electricity. That may seem small, but MISO is huge and Palisades is a slightly below-average-sized nuclear plant.
187,454 MW is the total installed capacity in MISO. Palisades’s 800 MW reactor is 0.42% of the total, implying the plant is punching above its weight in actual output. The spread is even larger when you consider that that average of 4.6 GWh is skewed earlier on in its lifetime and has been performing even better in its last decade of operation.
With decarbonization goals, MISO is in a precarious situation. MISO CEO has said that leaning too heavily on wind and solar risks grid destabilization. With planned retirements of existing reliable capacity like coal plants, large renewable pipeline, and expected load growth, MISO has its work cut out for itself to maintain reliability amidst decarbonization efforts.
Conclusion
While the grid keeps humming along without Palisades currently, I hope I showed the importance of the power plant for the changing MISO market, especially considering the ongoing decarbonizaiton efforts.
As we speak the active capacity in MISO is around 70GW. France was able to bring 60 GW of nuclear capacity online from the 70s to the 90s and 45 GW of that in a mere 10 year window in the 80s. This is equivalent to 56 Palisades plants in just 10 years. This would cover most of the electricity demand in the entire MISO power market by the late 2030s if it was willed to be.
The public has already been changing its tune on nuclear, but now political leaders in the US are too. With the connection of Vogtle reactors to the grid, the potential first restart with Palisades, and advanced designs on the way, nuclear might really “be back”. Until next week,
-Grayson
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