Media Statement by Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear, re: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Staff Announcement of Partial Authorization for Holtec's Restart of the Closed Palisades Atomic Reactor

Media Statement by Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear, re: Nuclear Regulatory Commission Staff Announcement of Partial Authorization for Holtec's Restart of the Closed Palisades Atomic Reactor

Environmental coalition vows to fight on, given unacceptable risks to the Great Lakes Basin

COVERT TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN and WASHINGTON, D.C., JULY 24, 2025--On July 18, 2025, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Staff posted a NOTIFICATION OF SIGNIFICANT LICENSING ACTION on its Agencywide Documents Access and Management System (ADAMS), stating:

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Staff is filing this notification to inform the participants in this matter that the Staff has provided the Commission with a Notification of Significant Licensing Action stating that, on or about July 24, 2025, the Staff intends to issue a final no significant hazards consideration determination and license amendment approving changes to the operating license and technical specifications to support the reauthorization of power operations at Palisades Nuclear Plant. Concurrently with the issuance of this license amendment, the NRC staff intends to issue its approval of a license transfer application, exemption request, and three license amendment requests related to the reauthorization of power operations at Palisades Nuclear Plant.

In fact, NRC did pull the trigger, at 12:50pm Eastern Time on July 24, 2025.

In response, Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps, issued the following media statement:

“Although NRC Staff and Holtec International would like everyone to believe the Palisades atomic reactor’s unprecedented restart is a done deal, our environmental coalition begs to differ.

The zombie reactor restart scheme is unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely high risk for health, safety, security, and the environment.

NRC Staff has determined there are no significant hazards to consider? How about the future wellbeing of the Great Lakes Basin — 21% of the entire planet’s surface fresh water — and all who call it home?

What about the risk of a Chornobyl- or Fukushima-scale catastrophe at Palisades? NRC is enabling Holtec to play radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shoreline. It is a grand nuclear experiment, and those of us downwind, downstream, up the food chain, and down the generations are the potential guinea pigs.

A 1982 study commissioned by NRC, and carried out by Sandia National Lab -- "Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences" -- estimated that a meltdown at Palisades would cause a thousand acute radiation poisoning deaths, 7,000 radiation injuries, and 10,000 latent cancer fatalities, as well as $52 billion in property damage. Adjusting for inflation to current dollar value figures, property damage would now surmount $168 billion. As the Associated Press has reported, the population has grown around Palisades in the past four decades, so resultant casualties would now be worse, as more people live, work, and recreate in harm’s way.

The first three Licenze Amendment Requests (LARs), Exemption Request, and License Transfer Request that NRC Staff have now tentatively approved, must still be approved by the NRC Commissioners. Even when they do, we plan to appeal against the final NRC greenlight for restart in federal court.

Our environmental coalition first petitioned to intervene, and request a hearing, in opposition to the Exemption Request in early December 2023. We did so again on October 7, 2024. At the same time, we contested various aspects of the LARs and License Transfer Request related to Holtec’s Palisades restart scheme.

Although NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel (ASLBP) ruled against our coalition’s intervention petition and request for hearings, we have appealed the adverse rulings to the NRC Commissioners. The Commissioners have yet to rule on our coalition’s appeals.

We also have challenged the adequacy of NRC Staff’s Environmental Assessment and Finding of No Significant Impact (EA/FONSI). 66 organizations and 145 individuals submitted extensive comments on the draft EA/FONSI, and our coalition filed related contentions with the ASLBP. When they ruled against us, we appealed that, as well, to the NRC Commissioners, who have not yet ruled.

In addition, we have challenged Holtec’s proposed band-aid fixes on the severely degraded steam generator tubes, a self-inflicted wound. The company — which has no reactor operating nor construction experience — neglected critical safety maintenace from 2022 to 2024, a ‘rookie error,’ as our nuclear engineer expert wtiness Arnie Gundersen has called it, one with potentially dire consequences. This neglect allowed corrosive chemical attack on both the inside and outside of the exceedingly thin-walled steam generator tubes. 

As Gundersen has testified in these proceedings, the failure of a single tube would result in a release of radioactivity to the environment. But a cascading failure of tubes could cause a reactor core meltdown, and catastrophic release of hazardous radioactivity onto the winds and waves. He warned about the potential consequences more than a decade ago, when he first served as our expert witness at Palisades, concerning yet another still unaddressed pathway to reactor core meltdown: the worst neutron-embrittlement of a reactor pressure vessel in the country, and likely in the world.

The steam generators and reactor pressure vessel are not the only critical safety systems, structures, or components at the brink of breakdown at Palisades, representing additional pathways to reactor core meltdown. Holtec does not plan to replace, or even repair, many of them, because NRC does not require it. Palisades’ restart will place the entire Great Lakes State and Great Lakes Basin at existential risk.

Holtec recently submitted yet another LAR to NRC, requesting a postponement on implementing fire protections that have also been neglected at Palisades for decades, despite related scandals there, and the fact that fully half of all reactor core meltdown scenarios can be initiated by fire, according to retired Union of Concerned Scientists nuclear power safety director, David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer. Our coalition is considering our options on this latest of Holtec’s growing list of LARs, another sign that Holtec and NRC are simply making it up as they go along.

For this reason, we will continue to resist Holtec’s Palisades zombie reactor restart scheme, enabled by a complicit and colluding NRC, at every opportunity. There is too much at stake to do otherwise.”

The coalition legally challenging Holtec’s Palisades restart scheme includes Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania. Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio, and Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, serve as the coalition’s co-counsel. Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, as well as Stanford University professor and world-renowned climate mitigation researcher Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson, serve as the coalition’s expert witnesses.

A one-stop-shop of Beyond Nuclear webposts about the Palisades restart scheme, as well as Holtec's scheme to build two new reactors on the same tiny site, date back to April 2022. This was when Holtec CEO Krishna Signh first floated "Small Modular Reactors" at Palisades, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated restart of the closed reactor.