HOLTEC SNAFUS

[Yard sign design by Michigan Safe Energy Future-Kalamazoo Chapter and Shut Down Palisades Campaign; photo by Kevin Kamps.]

HOLTEC SNAFUS

Worker falls into reactor

On October 21, a Palisades employee fell into the flooded reactor cavity, as Holtec continues racing at breakneck speed towards unprecedented restart of the 3.5 years closed nuclear plant by year end, ahead of its announced early 2026 Initial Public Offering. NRC’s incident report states the worker ingested radioactive water, and despite decontamination, suffered internal and external exposures.

It is important to note that others who assisted the worker, including the decontamination crew, were themselves put at risk of exposure to, and contamination with, hazardous ionizing radioactivity.

The ambulance crew who transported the injured worker to the hospital, and the nurses and doctors who cared for the worker there, was also at risk of exposure and/or contamination, as due to any lingering contamination still on the worker, left after the decontamination procedures were ended.

The Linear-No-Threshold (LNT) model of ionizing radioactivity’s harmfulness to human health, which has been the scientific basis for government regulations limiting exposure to hazardous ionizing radioactivity for nuclear workers and the public for many decades, holds that any exposure — no matter how small or low — carries a health risk, as for cancer causation, and that such risks accumulate over a lifetime of exposures.

Although cancer is often the focus of concern for radioactivity hazards for human health, a broad spectrum of maladies and morbidities are associated with ionizing radioactivity, truth be told.

The LNT model has long been under attack by the nuclear industry and its politically and economically powerful friends in high places, including government officials, both elected and appointed, as well as regulators. The attacks on radiation protection standards have reached a fever pitch during the current Trump administration, including an Executive Order signed by the president himself, further undermining LNT.

Such collusion harkens back to the 2012 finding by the Japanese Parliament, which concluded that the root cause of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe: collusion between the regulatory agency, the company, and government officials, left the three reactors that melted down vulnerable to the natural disasters that destroyed the plant.

Similarly, collusion between regulatory agencies, the industry, and elected as well as appointed government officials, has long represented a major threat to human health protections against hazardous ionizing radioactivity. A reflection of this is the U.S. standard for nuclear workers, limiting exposures to 5 Rem per year. This is 2.5 times higher than allowed internationally, where the limit has long been 2 Rem per year.

And after large-scale releases of hazardous ionizing radioactivity at Fukushima Daiichi began in March 2011, significant attempted, and even executed, weakening of human radiation protection standards downwind, downstream, and up the food chain began in earnest. Shockingly, the US EPA was significantly involved in this, behind the scenes. Precedents set in Japan have since been applied in the U.S. itself.

Some years ago, another Holtec worker was doused and dosed with radioactive water from an irradiated nuclear fuel container during pool to dry cask transfer at Oyster Creek, New Jersey.

So, these are but two examples, above, of Holtec’s incompetence, endangering workers and the public downwind and downstream, as well as up the food chain, and down the generations.

The Palisades incident on October 21, 2025 took place just one day after Holtec bragged about the related delivery of new fuel for the Palisades atomic reactor’s impending restart.

There was extensive media coverage of this incident: ARC West Michigan; CBS Detroit; ClickOnDetroit; Engineering News-Record; Fox 17 Grand Rapids; Futurism; Holland Sentinel; Hoodline Detroit; Interesting Engineering; Michigan Public (Radio); MLive; SSBCrack News; Toledo Blade; VICE; WGHN; WION; WOOD TV-8 Grand Rapids; WSJM; WWMT TV-3 Kalamazoo (October 22); WWMT TV-3 Kalamazoo (October 23); WWMT TV-3 Kalamazoo (October 23, part 2); WWMT TV-3 Kalamazoo (October 26); WZZM ABC TV-13 (Part 1); WZZM ABC TV-13 (Part 2); Yahoo! News.

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