|
COVERT TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN, MARCH 5, 2025--By the arbitrarily short March 3rd U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) deadline, environmental intervenors not only amended previous contentions, and filed new ones, with NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, against Holtec’s unprecedented restart scheme at the closed-for-good Palisades atomic reactor. They were also joined by more than 60 additional groups from across the U.S., and nearly 150 individuals, submitting comments critical of NRC’s recently published Environmental Assessment/Finding of No Significant Impact (EA/FONSI), by NRC’s distinct, but simultaneous and also short, March 3 due date.
Alluding to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock environmental protection law enacted in 1969, the coalition’s legal co-counsel, Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said “Having taken a hard look, the agency cannot choose to ignore what it saw.”
Palisades was designed in the mid-1960s, broke ground on construction in 1967, and fired up in 1971. It was a nuclear lemon from the get-go, and after 51 years of problem-plagued operations, till 2022, has also now become severely age-degraded, dangerously so.
Taylor was alluding to NEPA’s requirement that agencies take a “hard look” at environmental impacts and risks, before undertaking major federal actions. In this case, that would be NRC approving multiple License Amendment Requests (LARs), an Exemption Request, and a License Transfer Request. Holtec seeks NRC’s many approvals, in order to return the Palisades atomic reactor to operational status, from its permanently shutdown, decommissioning status, implemented by the previous owner, Entergy, in spring 2022.
An additional major federal action is the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) award of $1.52 billion, in the form of a nuclear loan guarantee to Holtec, for the restart scheme. However, the Trump administration has threatened to repeal and revoke the Inflation Reduction Act, and even claw back previously announced bailouts, casting Holtec’s taxpayer-funded subsidies into doubt.
Taylor was specifically referring to NRC’s analysis of significant climate change likely coming in the next 25 years in southwest Michigan. Despite acknowledging the likelihood of rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events, NRC then concluded that global warming would have no significant impact on the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant during renewed operations till mid-century.
This flies in the face of the coalition’s expert witness testimony from Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer of Fairewinds. He documented Holtec’s admission that Lake Michigan’s surface water temperature is already rising. Gundersen challenged Holtec’s strategy to address that, arguing that the company’s doubling of the size and capacity of the component cooling water heat exchangers is merely a make work/make money exercise, while installing more cooling towers would be the logical approach instead.
Regarding much of the rest of the EA, the coalition’s co-legal counsel, Terry Lodge of Toledo, Ohio, said “NEPA requires a hard look. Instead, NRC hardly looked at all, at countless increasingly significant effects from such extremes as flooding and drought, as well as monster storms, caused by worsening climate chaos.”
“NRC staff even stated that Palisades’ restart will make little to no difference in averting the worsening climate catastrophe,” said Michael Keegan, co-chair of Don’t Waste Michigan in Monroe.
Such an admission undermines the supposed Purpose and Need Statement in NRC’s EA, that Palisades’ restart was justified and mandated by a recently passed “clean energy” law in the State of Michigan.
“One problem with that is, nuclear power is not clean, far from it.” Taylor remarked.
The coalition’s comments addressed radioactive and toxic chemical emissions into the air and Lake Michigan from Holtec's reversal of Palisades' long-planned retirement, as well as resumed generation of forever deadly, highly radioactive, irradiated nuclear fuel, adding to the nearly thousand tons already stored on-site, with nowhere to go.
“Electricity is but the fleeting byproduct from Palisades,” Keegan added. “High-level radioactive waste is the actual product, a curse on all future generations.”
Beyond Nuclear and Don’t Waste Michigan, along with other environmental groups, will attend U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments this morning, regarding Holtec's proposed highly radioactive waste dumpsite in New Mexico. With capacity for up to nearly 200,000 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel, it would be the world’s largest. A similar "consolidated interim storage facility," Interim Storage Partners', 40 miles to the east in Texas, with a capacity for up to nearly 45,000 tons, is likewise before the Supreme Court today. There are about 100,000 tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel in the U.S. currently, an amount that increases by more than 2,000 tons annually, at 94 still operating reactors across the country.
If either dumps opens, Holtec could begin high-risk barging of high-level radioactive waste on the surface waters of Lake Michigan, into the Port of Muskegon, MI. This was originally a 2002 DOE plan, as part of the since cancelled Yucca Mountain Project, a national permanent repository targeted at Western Shoshone Indian land in Nevada. But Holtec embraced the barging scheme as its own, in its December 2020 Palisades Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report.
Another coalition expert witness, world-renowned climate scientist and renewable energy advocate, Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University, has testified that nuclear power is an opportunity cost in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and thus detrimental in mitigating climate change. Solar and wind power are more time- and cost-effective, but the more than $16 billion in public bailouts requested by Holtec, for Palisades’ restart, as well as for building two more “Small Modular Reactors” on the tiny site, will likely take many years that we don’t have to avert climate catastrophe, and starve quickly-deployed renewables of needed investment.
Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, based 35 miles downwind of Palisades in Kalamazoo, MI, asked “So does NRC’s FONSI mean they regard our area’s population, and environment, as insignificant?”
"A large concentration of African American and low income communities in Covert and Benton Harbor, and Latinos in the agricultural breadbasket of southwest Michigan, and the Indigenous Anishinaabe Nations of the Great Lakes, already bear significant Environmental Justice burdens, which Palisades’ restart will make even worse,” Kamps added.
NOTE TO EDITORS AND PRODUCERS: For more information about Holtec’s proposed restart of the permanently closed Palisades atomic reactor, and deployment of “Small Modular Reactors” on the same site, as well as at Palisades’ sibling Big Rock Point nuclear power plant site 250 miles north, also on the Lake Michigan shore near Charlevoix, MI, visit this website. To arrange an interview with Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer of Fairewinds, please contact Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear, kevin@beyondnuclear.org, (240) 462-3216.
|
