First TMI, Now Palisades. Is Uranium Back?
Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote this article about the news that Microsoft, of all companies, is working with Constellation to restart the shutdown Three Mile Island power plant. I had mixed feelings about it (though nothing having to do with nuclear power, which I’m generally cautiously in favor of). I told my class about it, and they had mixed feelings, too, with the same angles. Surprisingly, most people I’ve talked to about this are pro-nuclear and anti-Microsoft. I guess that’s not really surprising. After all, everybody hates Zorach’s Law– the fact that no matter what you study or what you do for work, a double-digit percentage of the average person’s workday will involve mucking about in (namely just formatting and reformatting) Microsoft Office documents. But I digress. Anyway, an announcement today about a deal to restart Michigan’s Palisades plant perhaps shows that even the Mitten State is capable of energy innovation.
Perhaps.

Palisades has a somewhat better track record than Three Mile Island, though both plants have the same type of pressurized water reactor (PWR). These designs are not new. But they’ve seen oodles of safety improvements since the days of yore. Notably, pretty much all technology is generally more than three miles ahead of where it was in 1979 (still heating domestic hot water and wiring houses the exact same way, though, ironically!). That the core technology doesn’t change that much is a testament to the fact that it was generally well-designed in the first place. But that we have learned from near-catastrophes to the point that we can add more passive and active safety measures is also significant.
PWR’s are considered relatively safe, all things considered. A major failure is less likely to cause a complete disaster because a reduction in core water pressure (or a loss of coolant) translates directly to reduced fission reactivity, which means less heat and therefore lower possibility of kaboom. In the case of TMI, a fault in the feedwater system reduced the fission reaction and initiated an emergency shutdown safely, but a combination of operator errors and erroneous system monitoring led to a partial core meltdown. While a serious event, this was nowhere near the scale of complete catastrophe, as in the case of the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986, which suffered a cascade of failures from which there were no built-in safeguards. I mention all of this to point out that, once again, in spite of its many problems, nuclear power is generally far safer than power sources like fossil fuels, which involve creating high levels of lethal pollution.
It gets more interesting when you find out that Holtec International, the company that bought the plant from Entergy, has been actively involved in developing small modular reactors, a popular discussion topic among the, ahem, fissionati. Holtec didn’t get its start building or operating nuclear reactors, though, which is why it’s a bit of an unusual candidate. Rather, the company spent years as an expert manager of nuclear waste. I imagine that work is no joke to begin with, so maybe this would incentivize someone to start thinking about diversification into another business unit dealing with nuclear something
Or, perhaps it involves in the fact that Holtec would have a much easier time getting some sort of nuclear something-or-other license from the NRC if they had already been working in this realm. Savvy management can do a lot of things like this, and a smaller company might even be far more nimble than, say, Westinghouse or General Electric, which are accustomed to gigantic contracts to build monumental infrastructure, but which might struggle with small-scale experimental innovation.
I don’t really know. That is but a guess!
Anyway, I’ll be staying tuned. While it is a little bit dismaying that our state’s big push to get into carbon-free power generation involves restarting a nuclear power plant rather than, say, making it economical to develop distributed photovoltaics (like they do in civilized jurisdictions), and while I am thoroughly skeptical of the whole AI vs. the power grid thing, the restarting of the Palisades Nuclear Plant is certainly a move in a not terrible direction, and I’ll certainly take it.