Palisades: Public Speaks Out Against “Zombie Atomic Reactor”

  For immediate release 

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

Public to Speak Out Against “Zombie Atomic Reactor” Restart

Environmental Coalition Presses its Case, Opposing Palisades’ Nuclear Power Plant Relicensing, at FEMA/NRC Emergency Preparedness Meeting in Benton Harbor, MI

“Emergency preparedness should never have been terminated in the first place,” said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a 32-year long watch-dog on Palisades. “There is plenty of potentially catastrophic risk even at an atomic reactor closed for good, especially the hazardous, highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel still stored on-site. While we support the re-establishment of emergency preparedness, NRC and FEMA’s requirements are woefully inadequate and must be significantly strengthened,” Kamps added.

There are well over 800 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel stored on-site at Palisades, generated since reactor operations began in 1971. Around two-thirds is still stored in the indoor wet storage pool, while one-third is stored in a variety of models of outdoor dry casks.

In a Feb. 22, 2021 analysis, done about a year before previous owner Entergy permanently shut down Palisades on May 20, 2022, thereby ending the reactor’s generation of highly radioactive waste, Robert Alvarez, a former senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Energy during the Clinton administration, reported:

“The Palisades ISFSI [Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation] holds 1096 assemblies in 13 NUHOMS 24PTH, 11 NUHOMS 32 PTH and 18 VSC-24 casks. There is a remaining balance of SNF [Spent Nuclear Fuel] assemblies in the Palisades Reactor spent fuel pool, which Holtec proposes to place in the 20 Holtec HI STORM  dry casks.”

NUHOMS is a cask model associated with Orano (formerly Areva, formerly Cogema), the U.S. branch of the French nuclear giant. The NUHOMS “P” designation is short for “pressurized” — Palisades is a Pressurized Water Reactor, or PWR. The NUHOMS cask models listed above can hold 24 and 32 PWR irradiated nuclear fuel assemblies, respectively. The Ventilated Storage Cask (VSC), no longer manufactured after the 1990s, after a series of safety-significant incidents, including at Palisades itself, can hold up to 24 PWR assemblies. Holtec’s HI STORM dry casks were originally designed to hold up to 24 PWR assemblies, but Holtec’s latest cask design, the UMAX, as proposed for use at Holtec’s consolidated interim storage facility in New Mexico, is 50% bigger, capable of storing up to 37 PWR assemblies. Fully loaded with irradiated nuclear fuel, the UMAX weighs 180 tons; its thermal heat and radioactivity content is also correspondingly larger than the other listed cask models in use at Palisades.

“If the nuclear catastrophe is bad enough, even if the evacuation goes well, those evacuees from across a broad region can never return home again, as happened at Chornobyl in Ukraine in 1986, and Fukushima Daiichi in Japan in 2011,” Beyond Nuclear’s Kamps pointed out.

An NRC commissioned study in 1982, CRAC-II (short for “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences,” also known as the Sandia Siting Study, or NUREG/CR-2239), estimated that a reactor core meltdown at Palisades would cause a thousand “peak early deaths” (from acute radiation poisoning), 7,000 radiation injuries, 10,000 latent cancer fatalities, and $52.6 billion in property damage. Adjusting for inflation alone, those 1982 dollar figures would now surmount $168 billion, expressed in 2023 dollar figures. And, as Associated Press investigative journalist Jeff Donn reported in 2012, populations have soared around U.S. reactors like Palisades in the past several decades. Thus, with more people in harm’s way, casualty figures would now increase accordingly, as well.

Meanwhile, Beyond Nuclear and its environmental coalition allies (namely, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania) continue to press their case against Holtec’s Palisades restart scheme. The coalition, represented by co-counsel Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio and Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, submitted a petition to intervene and request for hearing by NRC’s October 7, 2024 deadline. On November 4, NRC staff and Holtec published their Answers, seeking in various ways to block the coalition’s intervention and hearing. On November 12, the coalition submitted its Reply.

NRC’s three-administrative law judge panel of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) had initially proposed the week of December 16, 2024 for an hours-long session of oral argument pre-hearings. However, a separate intervention petition and hearing request, filed by Alan Blind on behalf of several Palisades Park Country Club residents, has caused the ASLB to consider possibly delaying the pre-hearings. Blind was a former senior engineer at Palisades under its previous owner Entergy. For its part, the environmental coalition has requested the pre-hearings be held in-person, locally near Palisades, given past precedents, as well as the intense public interest and high stakes of the unprecedented reactor restart scheme. Other options under consideration are in-person pre-hearings held at NRC’s HQ in Rockville, Maryland, and/or virtual/telcon pre-hearings.

For more information, please see “Newest Nuke Nightmares at Palisades, 2022-Present,” a compilation of web posts arranged chronologically backwards (newest information first) by Beyond Nuclear, dating back to April 2022, when Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, first floated the trial balloon of not closing Palisades after all, and Holtec CEO Krishna Singh first proposed constructing and operating so-called “Small Modular Reactors” (SMRs) at the Palisades site. Additional backgrounders are also posted there, including a breakdown of bailouts requested by Holtec at Palisades. More than $3 billion of public subsidies has already been awarded for the restart scheme, but Holtec has requested an additional $13 billion more in taxpayer and ratepayer funding, and still counting, for the restart and SMR new builds.

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