A Salt Lake City investment company has agreed to put up money to start the licensing process for the proposed Owyhee County nuclear power plant.

Alternate Energy Holdings, which is proposing a 1,600-megawatt plant near Bruneau, said Thursday that it received a $150 million commitment letter from Silverleaf Capital Partners LLC.

The commitment depends on Silverleaf Capital completing a review of Alternate Energy's background, financial records and plans for the proposed project. The company has 60 days to complete that.

Shane Baldwin, co-CEO and managing director at Silverleaf Capital, said Thursday that if the review goes well, the company could provide the money by the end of this month.

Baldwin's firm launched in December 2006 and focuses primarily on real estate development and alternative energy. He said this is Silverleaf's first investment in a nuclear power plant.

"We think the next wave of investment dollars will be going toward new nuclear plants," Baldwin said.

Don Gillispie, president and CEO of Alternate Energy Holdings, said the money would be used to buy the plant site and to obtain approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the plant.

"This provides the initial funding to launch an important project for Idaho and Western energy needs," Gillispie said in a statement. "We are now able to accept large equity investors who want to become minority owners in the West's only large, base-load nuclear power plant."

In June, Cobblestone Financial Group in New York, a company that focuses on commercial real estate, submitted a letter of intent to offer up to $3.5 billion for construction of the reactor. Gillispie said at the time that the funding would be provided in stages. Since that announcement, the cost of the project has increased to an estimated $4.5 billion.

Martin Johncox, a spokesman for the project, said the increased costs include the biofuels plant that would be built in conjunction with the nuclear plant.

Originally-based in Virginia, Gillispie announced this week that he was moving the company's headquarters to Eagle.