Holtec talks about nuclear power plant plans in New Jersey

Holtec International, the Camden-based firm that was once a target for reformers and criminal prosecutors in Trenton, has struck up informal talks with state officials that could make the Jersey Shore home to some of America’s first advanced nuclear reactors.

“We’re starting to have conversations now,” Patrick O’Brien, the company’s lead lobbyist, said in a recent interview with The Jersey Vindicator. “New Jersey is very much behind the idea of what we’re trying to do.”

O’Brien said work on a pair of his company’s 320-megawatt SMRs, or small modular reactors, could begin as early as 2031 at the site of the shuttered Oyster Creek Nuclear Generation site in Lacey Township just off Barnegat Bay.

Holtec, meanwhile, is pushing pro-nuclear legislation that is rapidly advancing in Trenton and could come up for a vote as lawmakers cram to finish unfinished business before their scheduled recess.

One bill that moved through the Senate Environment and Energy Committee last month would create new public subsidies and regulatory breaks beneficial to Holtec. The bill, sponsored by Senators Bob Smith and Nicholas Scutari, would give the state Board of Public Utilities sole authority to approve site plans for the new mini-reactors, removing the power of host communities to have final say on a proposed project.

If the bill becomes law, the new class of small reactors would be limited to two sites: Oyster Creek and the Salem-Hope Creek complex operated by the utility PSE&G on the Delaware River south of Philadelphia. The complex already produces more than 40 percent of New Jersey’s electricity.

The welcoming atmosphere for Holtec comes amid soaring electricity costs, anxiety over an unreliable power grid, and the collapse of New Jersey’s once-promising wind initiative. Despite powerful arguments from critics about the drawbacks of embracing a new class of unproven nukes, Holtec’s plans to re-nuclearize Oyster Creek seem to have won over Trenton, at least for now.

Smith, viewed in the Statehouse as a strong environmental advocate, says he dislikes the idea of creating a new stream of nuclear waste that will likely be stored in New Jersey for decades. But he says Holtec’s plan can’t be ignored at a time when climate change is wreaking havoc.

“The end of the world is coming soon, we need to find carbonless fuel, and right now things are not going well for renewables,” Smith argued during a recent committee hearing. “Our citizens will not stand for us not having a source of electricity in this state. We have to change the dynamic.”

Critics say New Jersey’s embrace of Holtec, and the nuclear option in general, will only change the dynamic for the worse while slowing the conversion to cleaner carbon-free options such as solar and battery storage.

They point primarily to the huge costs needed to get new projects off the ground, costs that will be borne by taxpayers. And even with massive public subsidies, they argue, it could be decades before advanced reactor technology clears regulatory hurdles and becomes a reality.

In Michigan, Holtec’s unprecedented plan to restart the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Plant on Lake Michigan would not be possible without a $1.5 billion loan from the United States Department of Energy and $300 million in additional subsidies provided by state taxpayers.

Federal subsidies are also being used to help create a market for future power from Palisades. A rural electric cooperative in Michigan and Indiana that agreed to the long-term purchase of power from Palisades has received $1.3 billion in federal grants to support the purchase.

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Holtec’s O’Brien said the company could conceivably seek to sell to a similar cooperative serving New Jersey if the Oyster Creek mini-nukes become a reality.

“The truth is that nuclear power, aside from all its inherent dangers, clearly can’t function without huge cash infusions from taxpayers,” Kevin Kamps, a leading anti-nuclear activist who is fighting against the Palisades project as well as Holtec’s controversial plan to build a nuclear waste dump in New Mexico, said in a recent interview.

“The billions taxpayers are spending on untested nuclear today will be a drop in the bucket to what they spend in the future if we keep going down this road,” Kamps said.

The pro-Holtec legislation moving through Trenton does not specify how much new subsidy would be created. The bill orders the Board of Public Utilities to study subsidies and come up with specific dollar amounts within a year. It would be the second major state subsidy created to prop up New Jersey nuclear in the past decade.

The Zero-Emission Credit program, created in 2018 with the urging of PSE&G, sent $300 million annually to owners of New Jersey nuclear facilities who claimed they were in danger of shutting down without help. The subsidy, which ended last year as nuclear operators began chasing more lucrative federal tax credits, was supplied directly by ratepayers in the form of a $70 surcharge on electric bills.

Government watchdogs like Doug O’Malley of the nonprofit Environment New Jersey say it’s impossible to know if all that cash was spent wisely because the state never ordered plant operators to open their books.

“We were told time and again that without that subsidy, these plants would go out of business. But we never asked for accountability. Now we’re set to go down that road again for new technology that is untested, dirty and years away,” O’Malley said in an interview with The Jersey Vindicator.

“In the end, you’re looking at nuclear as the most expensive way to boil water while other renewable options are here now and are getting cheaper,” O’Malley said. “Just look at what happened in Georgia.”

Two new nuclear reactors in Waynesboro, Georgia, that were heralded as the start of a United States nuclear renaissance took decades to build, even with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies going back to the Obama administration. By the time the plant began generating electricity in 2023, it was $17 billion over budget.

A project to build 12 small reactors in Idaho collapsed in 2023, despite years of planning and subsidies, after the estimated cost tripled in less than eight years. In 2020, the Department of Energy approved a $1.3 billion subsidy for the initiative, the “Carbon Free Power Project.”

“We keep going down this same road believing that nuclear power is some kind of magic solution, and we keep getting burned,” said Jeff Tittel, former head of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “Now Jersey’s getting ready to pour in a new round of subsidies. It’s absurd.”

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Chatter that Holtec would bring the new nuclear technology to Oyster Creek began in 2018 as soon as the company announced plans to buy the aging plant from former owner Exelon and decommission it as quickly as possible.

With the help of a $1 billion decommissioning fund financed by ratepayers, Holtec moved quickly to transfer spent fuel from a cooling pond to so-called dry casks that remain in storage at the 700-acre property.

In 2019, Holtec found itself mired in a high-profile probe of New Jersey’s tax break programs started by the Murphy administration. State investigators said the company had misrepresented its record of past ethical breaches in successfully applying for a $280 million tax subsidy to build a new manufacturing plant in Camden.

Holtec’s tax break, the biggest in state history, was frozen. After years of litigation, state courts sided with the company and ordered its tax award reinstated. Then, in 2024, the state fined Holtec $5 million to avoid criminal prosecution related to alleged fraud in seeking another tax break.

Holtec founder and chief executive Krishna Singh dismissed the fines as political retribution and has strongly defended the firm’s ethics.

Company officials say New Jersey’s recent courtship of the firm and plans for a new subsidy reflect the reality of the climate and energy crises. Anti-nuclear crusaders and government officials that once worked to stymie the company’s plans in several states have lost steam, they say, in New Jersey particularly.

“We’ve had very little headaches and lost sleep from opposition at Oyster Creek,” O’Brien said, pointing out that local officials in Ocean County back a new project at the site as a means to create jobs.

Janet Tauro, an Ocean County resident who has dogged Oyster Creek operations for years as a leader of local citizen groups, acknowledges that grassroots opposition has waned.

“There’s really not many of us,” she said in a recent interview. “The sad thing is that we thought we were finally free of this plant. Now it looks like they could be starting again and stockpiling even more dangerous waste on the site.”

In April, Tauro and residents across Ocean County watched as a drought-fueled brush fire burned through 15,000 acres of Pinelands brush. Officials in Trenton, who ordered a state of emergency as thousands were evacuated from their homes, said the blaze was among the worst of its kind in decades.

At one point, as local fire crews worked to contain the disaster, flames licked the fences of the Oyster Creek compound. While some embers fell within the compound, Holtec said, they were extinguished and never a threat. Plans to prevent a damaging fire at the plant are robust, they say.

“Those kinds of fires are only happening with more frequency,” said Tauro. “Why are we even thinking about more nuclear?”