Coalition objects to Holtec’s alleged abuse of Palisades DTF
[“Burning Money” image, by Gene Case/Avenging Angels. The image was featured on the cover of The Nation magazine in 2003, accompanying an article by Christian Parenti, about the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney nuclear power relapse then being attempted.]
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 in Covert Township, Van Buren County, Michigan.
The coalition has pursued such investigations for more than two years now (see previous posts, below). 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)
Please read on below for more information…
Beyond Nuclear & Don’t Waste Michigan to NRC: Request for investigation into misuse of Decommissioning Trust Fund at Palisades Nuclear Plant
Tens (to hundreds?!) of millions of dollars misspent from the Palisades Decommissioning Trust Fund?! [ongoing plundering?]
Holtec took ownership of Palisades, supposedly for decommissioning purposes, on June 28, 2022. This included taking ownership, and gaining access to, the ratepayer-funded Palisades Decommissioning Trust Fund (DTF). But Holtec pulled a con job, a bait and switch trick, instead secretly reversing its plans, as it announced on September 9, 2022: it would seek to restart Palisades instead, an unprecedented action, both outrageously expensive for the public, and extremely high-risk for safety, security, health, and the environment, even though it is not even needed! On March 31, 2023, Holtec’s Decommissioning Trust Fund (DTF) expenditures report, for its fleet of permanently shutdown reactors (Oyster Creek, New Jersey; Pilgrim, Massachusetts; Indian Point, New York; Palisades and Big Rock Point, Michigan), was posted at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) ADAMS (Agency-wide Documentation and Management System). Remarkably, just from January 1 to December 31, 2023, Holtec spent down $565 million from its various DTFs. The question was, how much decommissioning work was actually performed (as well as how much non-decommissioning work, such as spent nuclear fuel management and site restoration, which NRC has, most unfortunately, also allowed already inadequate DTF monies to be spent on). Holtec’s expenditures from the Palisades DTF are the most suspect and alarming. From June 28, 2022 to December 31, 2022, Holtec reported spending $44 million from the Palisades DTF. That means Holtec spent more than $7.33 million each and every month for six months. But on March 24, 2023, at a meeting with NRC regarding a regulatory pathway to unprecedented restart of a closed reactor, at Palisades, a senior Holtec spokesman revealed that Holtec had performed little to no decommissioning work up to that point. The only decommissioning work it had done was minor modifications to the mechanical draft cooling towers, all easily reversible, he stated. In addition, little to no spent nuclear fuel management, nor site restoration, had been done. This left stunned watchdogs wondering what the $44 million — nearly 10% of Palisades’ severely underfunded DTF — had been spent on?! Doing what?! By the next month, the watchdogs, including Beyond Nuclear, filed official allegations at the NRC’s Office of Investigations, as well as Office of the Inspector General, calling for investigations of both Holtec (for misspending DTF monies) and NRC staff (for allowing Holtec to do so) for violating laws and regulations governing DTF expenditures. The NRC investigators got back to the watchdogs some months later, reporting that they found no misspending of Palisades DTF monies by Holtec, other than a relatively small amount, $53,000, which Holtec had supposedly promised to repay, with interest. This has left watchdogs baffled, because their original question — on WHAT had Holtec spent $44 million from the DTF — remained unanswered. Watchdogs continue to suspect Holtec spent the money on its restart scheme, which would be illegal. The next DTF
expenditures report, published in late March 2024, revealed that Holtec’s high burn rate on the Palisades DTF continued after December 31, 2023, and actually worsened. Holtec reported that from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023, it had spent another $120 million from Palisades’ DTF. This is an average of $10 million per month, significantly higher than its 2022 spending rate! Again, stunned watchdogs asked, ON WHAT?! Thus, from June 28, 2022 to December 31, 2023, Holtec itself has reported spending a total of $164 million from the DTF at Palisades, but on what is most unclear. Watchdogs fear Holtec has treated the Palisades DTF as a slush fund to pursue its Palisades restart scheme, and perhaps even other schemes, meaning the already significantly inadequate DTF may vanish entirely, with little or no clean up of the severely radioactively contaminated Palisades site, on the Lake Michigan shore, ever to be carried out. By March 2024, NRC had cited Holtec for misspending DTF moneys on unauthorized activities across its decommissioning fleet of closed reactors, as reported by Christine Legere in the Provincetown Independent. However, whereas NRC and Holtec put the figure of misspending at Palisades at a mere $53,000, watchdogs continue to allege the misspending of tens of even hundreds of millions of dollars. On April 10, 2024, NRC held a Title 10, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 2.206 emergency enforcement petition hearing on watchdogs’ allegation of DTF misspending by Holtec at Palisades. That proceeding is still in limbo. As of October 15, 2024 — more than 1.5 years after watchdogs wrote NRC’s OI and OIG, demanding investigations — no clear accounting for how Holtec spent $164 million in Palisades’ DTF moneys, from June 28, 2022 to December 31, 2023, has ever been provided.
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NRC Cites Holtec for Improper Use of Decommissioning Trust Funds
Newest Nuke Nightmares at Palisades, 2022-Present.
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