Environmental coalition vows to fight on, given unacceptable risks to the Great Lakes Basin
By Kevin Kamps
On July 24, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a final notice to support the restart of power operations at the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan which was retired in May 2022.
The “zombie reactor” restart scheme is unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk for health, safety, security, and the environment. NRC staff has determined there are “no significant hazards” to consider. How about the catastrophic accident risks foisted on the Great Lakes Basin — 21% of the entire planet’s surface fresh water — and all who call it home?
A 1982 study commissioned by the NRC, and carried out by the Sandia National Lab — “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” — estimated that a meltdown at Palisades would cause 1,000 acute radiation poisoning deaths, 7,000 radiation injuries, and 10,000 latent cancer fatalities, as well as (inflation adjusted) $168 billion in property damage.
The coalition challenging Holtec’s Palisades restart scheme includes Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania. Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio, and Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, serve as the coalition’s co-counsel. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, as well as Stanford University professor and world-renowned climate mitigation researcher Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, serve as the coalition’s expert witnesses.
Our environmental coalition first petitioned to intervene and request a hearing, in opposition to the Exemption Request in early December 2023. We did so again on October 7, 2024.
The NRC ruled against our coalition’s intervention petition and request for hearings, but we have appealed the adverse rulings and are awaiting a response. We also have challenged the adequacy of NRC staff’s “Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact” (EA/FONSI). Sixty-six organizations and 145 individuals submitted extensive comments on the draft EA/FONSI, and our coalition filed related contentions.
In addition, we have challenged the Holtec company’s proposed band-aid fixes to the reactor’s severely degraded steam generator tubes, a self-inflicted wound. Holtec — which has no reactor operating nor construction experience — neglected critical safety maintenance from 2022 to 2024, a “rookie error,” as our nuclear engineer expert witness Arnie Gundersen has called it, with potentially dire consequences. This neglect allowed corrosive chemical attacks on both the inside and outside of the exceedingly thin-walled steam generator tubes.
As Gundersen has testified in these proceedings, the failure of a single tube would result in a release of radioactivity to the environment. But a cascading failure of multiple tubes could cause a reactor core meltdown, and catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity onto the winds and waves. He warned about the potential consequences more than a decade ago, when he first served as our expert witness at Palisades, concerning yet another still unaddressed pathway to reactor core meltdown: the worst neutron-embrittlement of a reactor pressure vessel in the country, and likely in the world.
Holtec recently submitted yet another request to postpone implementing fire protections that have also been neglected at Palisades for decades, despite related scandals, and the fact that fully half of all reactor core meltdown scenarios can be initiated by fire, according to retired Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear power safety director, David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer.
For this reason, we will continue to resist Holtec’s Palisades zombie reactor restart scheme, enabled by a complicit and colluding NRC, at every opportunity. There is too much at stake to do otherwise.
— Kevin Kamps works with Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit organization that aims to educate and activate the public about connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons.
