Jupiter, Fla.-based Holtec International (with most of it located in New Jersey) is setting out to be the Swiss Army knife of nuclear energy, the be-all and end-all of the business of radioactivity. Will the company’s private structure and secretiveness hamper its ambitions?
On May 1, Holtec announced its latest atomic venture, a wholly-owned subsidiary, HMI LLC, to provide “time-critical maintenance and modification needs of the world’s operating nuclear power plants with assured performance certainty.” HMI will be based in Chattanooga, Tenn., long a hotbed of nuclear business activity as once the Tennessee Valley Authority’s largest office (although TVA’s headquarters is in Knoxville).
Holtec says its aim is to “energize the presently placid business sector of ‘modification and maintenance’ that is widely considered to have suffered from lack of technology and capital infusion.’” To that end, Holtec says it expects to introduce widespread use of artificial intelligence and robotics at its customers’ sites.
It comes as no surprise that HMI’s first customer is Holtec itself: its subsidiary Palisades Energy LLC, formed as the vehicle to restart the shuttered 840-MW Palisades nuclear plant that Holtec bought from Entergy a month after the New Orleans utility holding company shut down the plant on Lake Michigan. Holtec bought Palisades ostensibly to decommission it, one of its major lines of business, but at the time and subsequently some observers have wondered whether Holtec was truly aiming at decommissioning, but at restarting the plant from the beginning.
Holtec then won a $1.5 billion loan from the U.S. Department of Energy for the revival of the plant, on top of the plant’s $550 million decommissioning trust fund that it got when it closed the deal with Entergy. How much of that decommissioning money can flow to the restart activities is not clear.
It would be the first nuclear power plant that Holtec would operate, while decommissioning three earlier acquisitions: the three-unit Indian Point complex, north of New York City on the Hudson River, which Holtec acquired from the New York Power Authority and Consolidated Edison in 2000 and 2001; New Jersey’s single unit Oyster Creek, which Holtec bought from Exelon in 2019; and Pilgrim, a single Massachusetts unit on Cape Cod Bay, which Holtec acquired from Entergy in 2018.
Moves Holtec made at Oyster Creek gave a strong hint of its dynastic visions. The Associated Press reported in January 2021, “Holtec International last month received $147.5 million — $116 million of which will come from the U.S. Department of Energy — to complete research and development work on a modern nuclear reactor that could be built at the site of the former Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in the Forked River section of Lacey Township, New Jersey.”
Holtec is bullish on building and operating trendy small modular reactors, having designed a 160-MW pressurized light water reactor. The company it says it would aim its SMRs at repurposed coal-fired power plants, despite technical problems involving the mismatch between the lower temperature steam from a nuclear reactor and the higher temperature steam turbines geared to coal.
Holtec is also active in trying to untangle the seemingly intransigent problem of storing spent nuclear fuel away from reactor sites. The company a year ago (May 9, 2023) won a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for a multi-billion-dollar “interim” spent fuel storage site in New Mexico near the Texas border.
That project has been held up in the courts after a ruling by the federal Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that the NRC does not have authority to issue such licenses. The case is a prime candidate for a U.S. Supreme Court review, which is probably more than a year away.
Kris Singh, 77, an Indian immigrant and PhD mechanical engineer (University of Pennsylvania 1972) and luxury car collector, founded Holtec International in 1986. Holtec soon began focusing on nuclear waste.
It’s first exposure to the waste storage business was a new design for the racks to hold spent fuel while it is initially stored internally in pools of water until it has cooled down sufficiently to be handled outside the reactor. According to the company, “By 1992, propelled by its transformative fuel rack technology, Holtec essentially became the sole supplier of wet storage solutions to nuclear power plants; a dominance that continues to this day.”
Its next line of business was the giant concrete casks used to dry store the used nuclear fuel outside at reactor sites, as they have nowhere else to go. According to the company, “By 2010, Holtec had approximately fifty dry storage patents and forty dry storage clients. By 2018, the number of patents held by the Company has approached 90 and the number of global customers was well in excess of 100.”
According to a recent Bloomberg profile, “In 2023 casks and related services accounted for more than half of Holtec’s $800 million in sales.”
Finding about just how much Holtec makes, its profits or losses, or other financial and company details are largely a mystery, as the company is privately owned. The company likely would have no trouble heading down the SPAC trail if it wished to become publicly traded but appears to have no appetite for that. The company is sparing in revealing anything beyond self-serving press releases.
Some information does come from legal cases and disputes. It is no surprise that a company of Holtec’s size and ambitions generates legal issues. The Bloomberg profile notes, “In its four years of decommissioning plants, Holtec has accrued a number of violations, raising concerns among some industry observers about its approach to safety. Others say a few infractions should be expected, and normal, in such a tightly regulated industry.”
At Oyster Creek, according to Bloomberg, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has fined Holtec “close to $250,000” for violations. “At the Pilgrim site, the company recently agreed to pay $200,000 for allegedly mishandling asbestos. The NRC has also issued lower-level safety violations for Holtec’s work at Indian Point.”
Recently, Holtec filed suit against New York in federal court challenging the state’s recent legislative ban on dumping radioactive (tritiated) water from the Indian Point decommissioning into the Hudson River.
The Times-Union of Albany reports that “Holtec International argues the federal government has the exclusive right to regulate what is discharged from the plant and that New York overstepped when it enacted the “Save the Hudson” bill in August 2023. Holtec cited the federal Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to back up its case. It further claims the state’s ban was unconstitutional based on the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, which says that federal laws generally trump state laws.”
The company says its wastewater “fully satisfies NRC regulations and is well within federal limits on radiological discharges.”
Its full name signifies the breadth of the Holtec’s ambitions. Among its many divisions and affiliates: Holtec Japan, Holtecasia, Holtec Ukraine, Holtec Division de Mexico, Holtec Europe, Holtec Canada, Holtec Brasil, Holtec Britain. Singh says, “The world’s energy, for the first time in 250 years, is going through an inflection point that it has never seen before. I want to provide reactors to all corners of the world.”
–Kennedy Maize