By Kevin Kamps
On July 24, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a final notice to support the restart of reactor 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.” Sixty-six organizations and 145 individuals submitted extensive comments on the draft assessment, 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 expert witness, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, has called it, with potentially dire consequences. Holtec’s 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 case of 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 Safety Project Director David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer.
For these reasons, we will continue to resist at every opportunity Holtec’s Palisades “zombie reactor” restart scheme, enabled by a complicit and colluding NRC. There is too much at stake to do otherwise.
— Kevin Kamps, the long-time nuclear waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, is now the Executive Director of Don’t Waste Michigan, in Kalamazoo.
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