Amended and New Contentions Opposing Palisades “Zombie” Reactor Restart
[Aerial view of Palisades nuclear power plant, looking eastward. Palisades is located on the Lake Michigan shore in Covert Township, Van Buren County, southwest Michigan.]
Our environmental coalition’s legal counsel, Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids IA, and Terry Lodge of Toledo OH, filed the following with the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel (ASLBP) by yesterday’s deadline:
They also filed a motion:
Petitioning Organizations’ Motion to File Amended and New Contentions.
This was necessitated by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s publication of a draft EA/FONSI on Jan. 31, 2025. A coalition of 66 organizations, and 145 individuals, commented on the draft EA/FONSI, as did Beyond Nuclear itself.
The EA/FONSI was filed just 12 days before the ASLBP held oral argument pre-hearings in this proceeding, on Feb. 12, 2025. Outrageously, the NRC attempted to moot several of our contentions, even in the lead up to the ASLBP oral argument pre-hearings.
Thus, on Feb. 26, 2025, our coalition’s legal counsel submitted a Brief to the ASLBP regarding why our environmental contentions should not be mooted, and why we should be allowed our allotted (and previously agreed upon by all parties) 30 days in which to amend our earlier contentions, or to file new contentions, based on NRC’s publication of the EA/FONSI.
Our environmental coalition, which has requested a hearing, and petitioned to intervene, in opposition to Holtec’s Palisades “zombie” reactor restart, as well as so-called “Small Modular Reactor” new builds at the Palisades and sibling Big Rock Point sites, includes: Beyond Nuclear; Don’t Waste Michigan; Michigan Safe Energy Future; Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, IL; and Three Mile Island Alert of Harrisburg, PA.
Our intervening coalition will file additional petitions, contentions, and requests, in the near future, challenging Holtec’s very recently filed License Amendment Requests (LARs) regarding Leak-Before-Break (LBB), as well as degraded steam generator (SG) tube BAND-AID fixes. We didn’t even learn of these until the Feb. 12th ASLBP oral argument pre-hearings, when Holtec’s outside counsel blurted out that the SG-related LAR had been filed the night before! While trying to track that down, our team also stumbled across the LBB LAR.
Palisades was a nuclear lemon from the start, in 1971. After 51 years of operations, it is severely age-degraded, dangerously so. Holtec has made this even worse, as by neglecting to put the steam generators in a chemically-preservative wet lay up. This has led to accelerated degradation of already age-degraded tubes. Palisades original owner, Consumers Energy, told the Michigan Public Service Commission two decades ago that the SGs needed replacement. But they never have been, not by Consumers Energy, Entergy, nor Holtec. Why not?! Because NRC does not require it. Cascading tube failure in SGs is a pathway to reactor core meltdown. A Chornobyl- or Fukushima-scale catastrophe is all too possible at Palisades.
All these recent ambushes, by NRC and Holtec, are in addition to four LARs, an Exemption Request, and a license transfer request, Holtec filed throughout the course of 2023-2024. This ad hoc, cobbled together, make-it-up-as-you-go, labyrinthine, Rube Goldberg Machine of a “regulatory pathway to restart” — for lack of clear regulations on this unprecedented restart scheme — is largely dictated by Holtec, with NRC rubber-stamps at each and every hairpin turn.
The U.S. Department of Energy is also complicit, by granting $1.52 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to Holtec for the restart effort, as well as serving as a “cooperating agency” in NRC’s insufficient, lower-level EA/FONSI.
So too is the State of Michigan. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was the first to float the trial balloon of not retiring Palisades after all, just a month to the day of when the previous owner, Entergy, shut the reactor down for good, on May 20, 2022, and officially certified as much with NRC on June 13, 2022. Whitmer then succeed in getting the then-Democratic majority State House and Senate to agree to $300 million for Holtec’s reactor restart effort.
Holtec took over Palisades on June 28, 2022, supposedly to decommission it. But this was a bait and switch trick, a ruse, a con game, and a big lie. Just a week later, Holtec secretly applied to DOE for many billions of dollars in bailouts for the restart effort.
We have demanded a higher level EIS — Environmental Impact Statement — and even a Programmatic EIS, given the Palisades “zombie” reactor restart’s precedent setting for other “zombie” reactors to follow: Three Mile Island Unit 1 in PA; Duane Arnold in IA; Diablo Canyon 1 and 2 in CA; and Summer 2 and 3 in SC.
The Japanese Parliament concluded, after a year-long independent investigation (the first in its history), that the root cause of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe, that began on March 11, 2011, was collusion between the so-called safety regulatory agency, the company Tokyo Electric, and government officials.
Such collusion exists in spades at Palisades, as between NRC and DOE, Holtec, and the State of Michigan, its governor, legislature, and U.S. congressional delegation. Palisades’ “zombie” reactor restart represents an existential threat to the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes State, and beyond.
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