Holtec Submits Yet More Palisades LARs!

[Photo by Gabriela Bulišová from the second Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp at Van Buren State Park, immediately north of the Palisades atomic reactor, August 2000. Palisades’  reactor containment building and steam are visible, as is Lake Michigan.]

The Rube Goldberg machine of a make-it-up-as-you-go “regulatory pathway to restart” at the Palisades atomic reactor — located in Covert Township, Van Buren County, on the Lake Michigan shoreline in southwest Michigan — just got worse.

At last week’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel oral argument pre-hearings, Holtec’s attorney blurted out that a License Amendment Request (LAR) regarding Palisades’ severely degraded steam generator tubes had just been filed the night before — news to us!

Despite our environmental coalition’s repeated searches of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ADAMS (Agencywide Document Access and Management System), the mysterious steam generator LAR has yet to be posted there, more than a week later.

However, our coalition’s searches of the NRC docket did reveal yet another LAR, filed just days before our ASLB session on February 12, regarding the overly optimistic “Leak-Before-Break” concept — again, news to us!

Here is more information about the Leak-Before-Break LAR:

Note that the Leak-Before-Break LAR is dated 2/5/2025, but was not placed into the NRC ADAMS docket till a full week later, on 2/12/2025. To the best of our knowledge, the related Federal Register Notice has still not been published. This is all very important, given the arbitrarily short and hyper-strict “do-or-die” deadlines NRC imposes on would-be intervenors like our coalition in these proceedings.

Despite these “GOTCHA!” ambushes by Holtec and its supposed “regulator,” NRC, our environmental coalition’s legal counsel remain hard at work, such as amending earlier contentions in response to NRC’s January 31 Environmental Assessment (EA). We face a March 3 deadline not only to amend our previous National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)-related contentions, but also to submit any new ones related to the just-published EA/Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI).

Just today, on February 19, our coalition faces a deadline to brief the ASLB three-judge panel on why our NEPA-related contentions should not just be mooted, even though we supposedly still have more than a week to amend our earlier contentions, or submit new ones.

(Here is our coalition’s Brief, as filed by our co-legal counsel, Iowa-based attorney Wally Taylor, and Toledo-based attorney Terry Lodge, on 2/19/25, by the ASLBP deadline.)

March 3 is also the deadline for any public comments on NRC’s EA/FONSI. For starters, the only logical explanation for NRC’s FONSI is that they consider area residents, and their health, safety, security, and environment, to be insignificant. Thus, any and all impacts from the unprecedented, unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk Palisades “zombie” reactor restart scheme must also be deemed insignificant.

To learn more about our nearly three years and counting of resistance to the Palisades restart, as well as to Holtec’s scheme to build so-called “Small Modular Reactors” at Palisades and its sibling closed-for-good and decommissioned reactor site, Big Rock Point (between Charlevoix and Petoskey, also on the Lake Michigan shore, hundreds of miles to the north), see our PALISADES NUCLEAR NIGHTMARES chronological (backwards) web post.