Long-serving Holtec advisory board member indicted on racketeering in New Jersey

[Photo: George Norcross (center) sits in the front row before a press conference where New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin (not pictured) announced corruption charges against him in Trenton, New Jersey, on June 17, 2024. | Daniel Han/POLITICO]

As reported by Politico, George E. Norcross III (pictured above), a New Jersey Democratic Party kingmaker and very long-serving Holtec International advisory board member, was indicted by the Attorney General of New Jersey on racketeering charges.

The New York Times also reported on this story, pointing out:

On Monday afternoon, George Norcross, who now lives in Florida, showed up at a news conference Mr. Platkin held in Trenton, N.J. Dressed in a suit and loafers without socks, he stared from the front row of the room as the attorney general described the charges contained in a 111-page indictment. Mr. Norcross’s team of lawyers and at least one co-defendant, William Tambussi, a lawyer who has represented the city of Camden, sat behind him. (Emphasis added)

The Washington Post’s coverage also mentioned George E. Norcross III’s sock-less status.

Perhaps the indictments “knocked his socks off”?!

George E. Norcross III, who has a brother (Donald Norcross) who has served as a U.S. Representative for a decade, has previously been embroiled in another major scandal, involving yet a third Norcross brother, Philip A. Norcross — an attorney, also just indicted for racketeering, who authored a State of New Jersey tax break law, that garnered George Norcross III-affiliated businesses with more than a billion dollars in tax breaks.

(U.S. Rep. Donald Norcross recently joined a letter calling for the Palisades zombie reactor restart to be promptly approved by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and generously bailed out by U.S. taxpayers via the U.S. Department of Energy, to the tune of many billions of dollars. Palisades is owned by — guess who?! — Holtec! Holtec lied to get its hands on Palisades. It said it was going to decommission it after it was closed for good by its previous owner, Entergy. But instead, it secretly applied within days, to DOE, for billions in bailouts to restart it, in addition to $7.4 billion more, to build two so-called “Small Modular Reactors” alongside the zombie reactor.)

Just one of these was a $260 million tax break for Holtec. Holtec used the funds to build its Camden, New Jersey headquarters and manufacturing facility, named for Holtec’s CEO, Krishna Singh.

But when asked on the New Jersey tax break application form, under oath, if Holtec had ever been disbarred from doing business with a federal or state government agency, Holtec CEO Krishna Singh answered “no.” This constituted yet more law breaking, because the correct and truthful answer was actually “yes.” Politico, and WNYC, broke this story in 2019.

After Singh himself was implicated in a Holtec bribery conviction, the company was in fact disbarred — albeit temporarily — from doing business with a federal agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Singh and Holtec had bribed a TVA official at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama, to the tune of $55,000. The bribe secured Holtec a contract there for highly radioactive waste management.

Once the bribery was discovered, the TVA official was convicted in court. But Holtec was also fined $2 million by TVA, and disbarred from doing business with the quasi-federal agency for a short 60 days.

After that, Holtec simply carried on with the contract it had stooped to bribery to obtain. Thus, Holtec regarded the $2 million fine, and 60-day disbarment, as simply a cost of doing business.

Yet another example of Singh’s and Holtec’s serial bribery was its attempt to bribe whistleblowers into silence, regarding countless quality assurance violations associated with the fabrication of its high-level radioactive waste storage and transportation containers. According to both whistleblowers, Singh offered them jobs at Holtec — they could name their own salaries, into the hundreds of thousands of dollars — but they had to shut up about the QA violations. Both whistleblowers turned down Singh’s bribe offer. The NRC has allowed thousands of Holtec containers, of suspect structural integrity, to be loaded since with high-level radioactive waste.

But Singh’s lie on his tax break application form to the State of New Jersey constituted yet another, albeit unindicted, crime. But, as reported by NJ Spotlight News, the NJ AG is nonetheless at least currently still seeking to claw back the $260 million, obtained through unindicted perjury, in an appeal before the New Jersey State Supreme Court.

(And, as also reported by NJ Spotlight News, it turns out that Singh lied yet again, on a separate tax break application form. The NJ AG settled with Singh on that one, issuing a $5 million fine, and putting Holtec on a sort of probationary supervision, regarding future tax break applications, for the next three years.)

NRC responded to Beyond Nuclear’s repeated objections to its willingness to grant high-risk licenses (such as for high-level radioactive waste consolidated interim storage in New Mexico) to Holtec despite its criminality, by saying bribery is not its department, and urging us to take such complaints to the DOJ.

Such collusion between NRC and Holtec harkens back to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe. The year after it began, the Japanese Parliament concluded that collusion, between the safety regulatory agency, the company (Tokyo Electric Power Company), and government officials (both elected, and appointed), was the root cause that led to the nuclear catastrophe. But as shown above, such collusion exists in spades in the United States as well. Are we living on borrowed time, before such American nuclear collusion results in an inevitable nuclear catastrophe here?

Interestingly, Holtec’s website no longer lists George Norcross III as an advisory board member. It seems to be a recent development. The Wayback Machine snapshot of Holtec’s website for April-May 2024 showed Norcross as still listed as a Holtec advisory board member.