Palisades restart timeline questioned

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

A front page, below the fold article by Carol Thompson in the Detroit News on Tuesday, November 26, 2024 was entitled “Nuke plant restart timeline questioned: Decision to repair, not replace damaged part irks safety advocates.”

The article is behind a paywall.

It reported on Palisades’ severely age-degraded steam generators, a safety-critical plant SSC (system, structure or component). A teleconference between Palisades owner, Holtec, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), regarding an early September steam generator inspection, revealed “1,417 ‘indications,’ or flaws, on 1,032 [of] the component’s 16,438 total tubes,” the article reports.

NRC issued a rare Preliminary Notification of Occurrence (PNO) nearly three months ago.

Watchdogs have known Palisades’ steam generators needed replacement — for the second time in the atomic reactor’s history — by spring 2006, when initial Palisades owner Consumers Energy said so to the Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC; see page 2 of the company’s slideshow presentation).

A rapid, cascading failure of enough steam generator tubes all at once can actually lead to a reactor core meltdown.

A 1982 NRC commissioned report, CRAC-II (short for Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences, also known as the 1982 Sandia Siting Study, or NUREG/CR-2239) estimated that a reactor core meltdown at Palisades would cause: a thousand acute radiation poisoning deaths; 7,000 radiation injuries; 10,000 latent cancer deaths; and $52.6 billion in property damage.

In a post-Fukushima series entitled “Aging Nukes,” AP investigative journalist Jeff Donn reported that populations have soared around U.S. atomic reactors since 1982, meaning CRAC-II’s casualty figures must be increased correspondingly, as more people now live in harm’s way.

And adjusting for inflation alone, property damages would now be $168 billion, expressed in current dollar figures.

Donn’s series also cited reactor pressure vessel (RPV) embrittlement, and pressurized thermal shock risk of reactor core meltdown, as a top example of NRC regulatory retreat.

In April 2013, under many years-long, intense pressure by local and national watchdogs, NRC at long last acknowledged, in writing, that Palisades has the worst neutron-embrittled RPV in the country. The second worst, according to NRC, is Point Beach Unit 2 in Wisconsin. Thus, Lake Michigan — drinking water supply for 16 million people, and a major headwaters for the rest of the Great Lakes downstream — is wedged between the high risk of Palisades and Point Beach’s embrittled RPVs. This safety risk grows worse with ongoing age-related degradation at operating reactors.

But Palisades’ next owner, Entergy, did not replace the steam generators, despite operating the age-degrading reactor from 2007 to 2022, while making profits of up to 57% above market rates, compliments of a Power Purchase Agreement gouge on ratepayers’ electric bills, blessed by then Michigan Governor (now Energy Secretary) Jennifer Granholm’s MPSC. Entergy did not do the replacement, because NRC did not require it, despite steam generator tube failures in the past — such as at Indian Point, New York; Byron, Illinois; and San Onofre, California — that resulted in releases of hazardous radioactivity into the outside environment.

San Onofre’s tube failure — in very costly, brand new, replacement steam generators — led to the permanent shutdown of two reactors, in June 2013.

The Detroit News article quotes Bette Pierman of Michigan Safe Energy Future (MSEF)-Shoreline Chapter, a local resident near Palisades:

Bette Pierman, a member of the anti-nuclear and [anti-] fossil fuels group Michigan Safe Energy Future, said Palisades’ steam generator should be replaced. During the Nov. 20 meeting, she criticized Holtec and previous Palisades owners for using “Band-Aids” instead of conducting meaningful maintenance on the 53-year old plant.

“They’d find a problem and they’d do some kind of Band-Aid fix instead of spending money to do what they need to do,” she said.

MSEF has joined Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago (the major American city draws its drinking water supply from Lake Michigan, on the opposite shore from Palisades), and other organizations, such as Three Mile Island Alert of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in legal interventions against Palisades over the years and decades. The most recent intervention, now underway since October 7, 2024, seeks to block Holtec’s unprecedented, unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk Palisades “zombie” reactor restart scheme.

The Detroit News article also quoted Dr. Ed Lyman at UCS:

Replacing the steam generator could derail Holtec’s plans to get Palisades online by the end of next year, said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Massachusetts-based science advocacy group.

“It’s a big job,” he said. “I wouldn’t underestimate the time and the cost that that could actually take.”

Even Holtec gave some lip service to replacing the clearly age-degraded steam generators at Palisades, in a secret bailout application and restart strategy document submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy on July 5, 2022 — just a week after the company had acquired Palisades, under the pretense of decommissioning it (dismantling facilities, and performing radioactive contamination clean up, including radioactive waste management and disposal (for “low-level”), or storage (for high-level)).

In the document, obtained by Beyond Nuclear through a FOIA request to the State of Michigan, Holtec estimated replacing the steam generators would cost $510 million, the single largest line item expense on its long list of anticipated maintenance, repair, and replacement jobs needed in order to restart Palisades.

However, earlier this year, in an interview with Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, Holtec’s Palisades spokesman, Nick Culp, indicated the steam generators would merely be repaired, not replaced.

Such contemplated repairs, according to reported statements attributed to Holtec spokespeople such as Culp, include plans to un-plug 600 steam generator tubes that were plugged 35 years ago when they were brand new, as a safety-related precaution. Other contemplated repairs, according to Holtec, include merely adding “sleeves” over problem tubes, rather than replacing them.

At the second Palisades restart “love fest” held at the atomic reactor since March 27, 2024, a top DOE official questioned Holtec’s start up date.

As reported by Michigan Bridge on September 30, 2024:

Holtec officials hope to open by late 2025, but Jigar Shah, director of the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office, told reporters it will take “a couple of years.”

Despite Shah’s flip comment that restart of Palisades could take a year longer than Holtec has been saying, he nonetheless approved $1.52 billion in federal taxpayer backed loan guarantees for the scandal-plagued company.

Is Shah’s estimate, of a year-long delay in restart, a Freudian slip about the safety-significant steam generator tube degradation revelations?!