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By Valerie Volcovici
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Biden administration is working on plans to bring additional decommissioned nuclear reactors back online to help meet rising demand for emissions-free electricity, White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi said on Monday.
Two such projects are already underway, including the planned restart of Holtec’s Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan and the possible restart of a unit at Constellation Energy’s Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, near the site of the worst nuclear accident in American history.
Asked if more shuttered factories could be restarted, Zaidi said: “We are working on it in a very concrete way. There are two that I can think of.”
He declined to identify the power plants or provide further details about the effort.
Speaking at the Reuters IMPACT conference in New York, Zaidi said repowering existing dormant nuclear power plants was part of a three-pronged strategy by President Joe Biden’s administration to bring more nuclear power online to fight climate change and boost production .
The other two pillars include the development of small modular reactors (SMRs) for certain applications, and the continued development of advanced next-generation nuclear reactors.
Biden has called for a tripling of U.S. nuclear power capacity to feed energy demand, which is accelerating in part due to the expansion of energy-hungry technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
Last week, the Biden administration said it had taken out a $1.52 billion loan to revive the Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan, which would take two years to reopen.
Constellation and Microsoft (NASDAQ:), meanwhile, signed an energy deal last month to revive a unit of the Pennsylvania factory, which Constellation hopes will also receive government support.
Zaidi told the conference that the US Navy had requested information on Monday to build SMRs at half a dozen bases. “SMR is a technology that won’t happen for decades. It’s a technology that companies in the United States want to deploy this decade,” he said.
Zaidi also addressed the problems associated with a separate Biden clean energy goal of bringing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind online by the end of the decade.
The government this year suspended sales of offshore wind farms in both Oregon and the Gulf of Mexico due to low business demand, as other projects faced high costs, equipment problems and supply chain challenges.
Zaidi said at least half of the 30GW target is already under construction and some of the early issues provide useful lessons for future projects.
“I’m quite optimistic about the next wave of projects where we will have a domestic supply chain and hopefully have better capital costs compared to the projects we are dealing with now,” he said.
