Yet ANOTHER nearly billion $ bailout at Palisades zombie reactor?!

Crain’s Business Grand Rapids has reported that the Wolverine rural electric co-op, announced five weeks ago as a Power Purchase Agreement partner with Holtec in the Palisades zombie reactor restart scheme, seeks to cover 25% of its PPA costs with a federal bailout from the U.S. Department of Agriculture!

The Holtec-Wolverine PPA is modeled on the 2007-2022 Entergy-Consumers Energy PPA. On the day Palisades closed for good, May 20, 2022, a Consumers Energy spokesman confessed the 15-year long PPA had at times cost ratepayers up to 57% above market rates on their electric bills.

As revealed in a State of Michigan response to a FOIA filed by Beyond Nuclear, it has now been made public that Holtec hopes to generate $412.5 million per year, or more, in PPA revenues from Wolverine. Thus, if Wolverine succeeds in its Palisades zombie reactor restart PPA bailout request to the Dept. of Ag, then 25%, or $103,125,000 per year would be paid by U.S. taxpayers.

But this would be in addition to so much more taxpayer subsidization at Palisades:

$2 billion in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Civil Nuclear Credits + $1 billion in DOE loan guarantees + $300 million from the State of Michigan in outright grants + this $970 million in US Ag Dept reimbursement for PPA electricity  to Wolverine rural electric co-op

=$4,270,000,000 in federal and state bailouts, all tied up in the Palisades zombie atomic reactor restart alone!

Add the $7.4 billion DOE loan guarantee for 4 Small Modular Reactors at Palisades, and the grand total of taxpayer bailouts adds up to $11,670,000,000 of taxpayer bailouts at Palisades.

But the US Ag Dept. bailout would only cover 25% of the PPA. The other 75% would remain a gouge on Wolverine ratepayer electric bills.

Is there not a less risky, more cost effective way to generate that electricity? Of course there is—renewables, storage, and especially efficiency could do that job for a heckuva lot less money, and much more quickly, and genuinely cleanly. And with a whole lot less risk to health, safety, security, and the environment.

To add insult to injury, this U.S. Department of AGRICULTURE bailout would enable the Palisades zombie reactor to sail ever deeper into uncharted safety risk territory. Palisades is located in one of the most productive agricultural counties in Michigan — Van Buren — with its famous blueberries, peaches, and so much more. Including organic agriculture — just ask MOFFA (Maynard Kaufman, long rooted in Bangor, within the 10-mile emergency planning zone of Palisades, was a co-founder of the Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance; he resisted Palisades before ground was broken on its construction, in the mid- to late-1960s, and continued his principled resistance until his passing in 2021). This would all be put at risk by the extremes of the safety risk spectrum — breakdown phase risks at the zombie reactor, break-in phase risks at the 4 SMR new builds, and the risk of a domino-effect, multi-reactor meltdown, as happened at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan beginning on March 11, 2011.

Radioactive Kool-Aid anyone?!

[Image above by Gene Case/Avenging Angels. Used with permission. The image appeared on the cover of The Nation magazine in 2003, accompanying an article by Christian Parenti about the nuclear power relapse at the time, which is exactly what we now face again!]