Contact: Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist, Beyond Nuclear, Kalamazoo, MI, (240) 462-3216, [email protected] 

Michael Keegan, co-chairman, Don’t Waste Michigan, Monroe, MI, [email protected]

Coalition Objects to Holtec’s Alleged Abuse of Palisades Decommissioning Trust Fund

Environmental Groups Continue to Allege Company Misused Funds for Unprecedented Closed-Reactor Restart Scheme

In a letter, an environmental coalition — Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, and Michigan Safe Energy Future — has objected to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) proposed director’s decision to end investigations into Holtec International’s alleged misuse of the Decommissioning Trust Fund (DTF) at the Palisades atomic reactor. The DTF has been ratepayer-funded on households’ and businesses’ monthly electric bills for decades.

The coalition has pursued such investigations for more than two years now (see previous Beyond Nuclear posts, below, for more information). The coalition’s legal co-counsel, Terry Lodge of Toledo, OH, and Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, IA, sent the letter to NRC on July 2, 2025.

The letter includes this paragraph:

“The Petitioners’ original question still remains unanswered: How could Holtec legitimately spend $143,000,000 from the decommissioning trust fund when Holtec admits that it has never engaged in any decommissioning activity? It is rank dereliction of the agency’s responsibility for NRC to have neither asked nor answered that question. The NRC’s response to the Petitioners’ valid public concerns borders on willful blindness. In legal terms the NRC’s conduct is arbitrary, capricious, unreasonable, an abuse of discretion, and violates the agency’s statutory duties.” (Emphasis in original)

“The Office of the Attorney General of the State of Michigan, Dana Nessel, has asserted that the Palisades DTF is $200 million short, so not even able to pay for Holtec’s own Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report plan dated December 2020,” said Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan in Monroe, MI.

“The current $200 million shortfall results from Consumers Energy and Entergy drafting $200 million from the Decommissioning Trust Fund in 2007 with the blessing of then-Governor Jennifer Granholm’s Michigan Public Service Commission.The Palisades DTF has never recovered. Fast forward 15 years and Granholm leads the DOE Band to Restart, and buries the $200 million shortfall forever. In my opinion this has all of the appearance of a slow motion engagement in creative accounting shenanigans,” Keegan added.

NRC has also consistently approved Holtec’s requests for waivers and exemptions from prohibitions on spending DTF money on anything other than actual decommissioning work. For example, NRC has approved Holtec requests for authorization to spend DTF funding on irradiated nuclear fuel (also called spent nuclear fuel) management expenses. However, NRC has cited — albeit with little to no consequence — Holtec in the past for spending more Palisades DTF money on irradiated nuclear fuel management than the agency had previously authorized.

In an April 7, 2025 press release, Holtec stated: “The [Palisades] plant’s dry fuel storage loading campaign that began in December 2024 was completed last week, with a majority of the dry storage-eligible fuel transferred to 11 MPC-32 canisters on the plant’s on-site storage pad.”

“This major irradiated nuclear fuel transfer from indoor wet storage pool to outdoor dry cask storage, without an NRC-approved Emergency Plan in place, was dangerous, shocking and outrageous,” said Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, based in Kalamazoo, MI.

“It appears Holtec is milking Palisades’ current decommissioning status as a regulation-free zone, and NRC is complicit. The Japanese Parliament concluded, in an independent investigation published a year after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe had begun in March 2011, that the root cause was collusion, between the safety regulatory agency, the company, and government officials. We have such potentially catastrophic collusion in spades at Palisades,” Kamps added.

“The cobbled together, ad hoc, make it up as you go along ‘regulatory pathway to restart’ that NRC and Holtec have conjured from thin air at Palisades has led to such high-risk taking as transferring many hundreds of heavy loads — 100-ton, fully loaded, highly radioactive waste containers — over the Palisades pool, with no evacuation plan in place if a dropped cask damaged the pool, and drained the cooling water, leading to a catastrophic radioactive fire,” said Terry Lodge, Toledo, Ohio-based co-counsel for the environmental coalition.

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