Two recent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists exposés on Holtec, by Matt Smith (Nov. 10 and Dec. 3, 2025)

[Kevin Kamps]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

For your information, please click through and/or read on below. Thanks!

---Kevin Kamps, Beyond Nuclear

P.S. In the Nov. 10 article, there is a section about Yucca Mountain. At both Holtec's as well as Interim Storage Partners' consolidated interim storage facilities, the companies simply assumed Yucca Mountain, on Western Shoshone land in Nevada, would ultimately open as the national permanent geological repository (hence, their supposed justification for calling the CISFs "interim"!). NRC -- supposedly the neutral, unbiased, objective judge of the Yucca dump licensing proceeding -- agreed with the companies' assumptions, and approved their CISF construction and operating licenses, based on that falsehood. I guess NRC had already made up its mind, even though no Yucca dump licensing proceeding has ever been conducted?!

<https://beyondnuclear.org/bas-exposes-on-holtec/>

BAS exposés on Holtec

December 6, 2025

Investigative journalist Matt Smith has published two articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) in the past couple weeks regarding Holtec International.

The first, published November 20, 2025, is entitled “How Holtec International Became an Expanding (and Controversial) Nuclear Power: Following its start as a producer of nuclear waste storage canisters, Holtec International has built an empire around mothballed nuclear power plants and as-yet incomplete nuclear initiatives. The firm’s history of overpromising and underdelivery raises a question: Is this who we should trust with the future of nuclear energy?“

In a section entitled “How decommissioning became recommissioning,” the article quotes Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist Kevin Kamps: “They lied about what they were going to do at Palisades. They said they were taking over ownership to decommission the plant. Little did we know, they weren’t even intending to decommission,” said Kevin Kamps with Beyond Nuclear, an anti-nuclear advocacy group. “This was a trick to get their hands on the plant.”

In fact, Beyond Nuclear, in coalition with other environmental groups like Don’t Waste Michigan and Michigan Safe Energy Future, challenged Holtec’s takeover in the first place, even regarding false promises of decommissioning, let alone the truth revealed later, that unprecedented closed reactor restart was the actual plan.

The West Michigan office of Environmental Law and Policy Center of Chicago also intervened against Holtec’s takeover, as did the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Michigan, Dana Nessel.

See related documents here.

Additional groups — Nuclear Energy Information Service of Chicago, and Three Mile Island Alert of Pennsylvania — would then join our enviro coalition, opposing Holtec’s Palisades zombification scheme. The coalition’s legal counsel include Terry Lodge of Toledo, OH, and Wally Taylor of Cedar Rapids, IA. Its expert witnesses include nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, as well as Stanford U. professor and climate expert Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson.

Then, on December 3, 2025, Matt Smith published a follow on article at BAS, entitled “Ukraine’s Energoatom, Holtec International, and the US retreat from fighting corruption abroad.”

For more information on the radioactive skeletons in Holtec’s closet, see a 2017-2020 annotated bibliography by Beyond Nuclear’s Kamps, a 2020 “rap sheet” by Holtec watchdog Nancy Vann near Indian Point, New York, and a two-page backgrounder (“Holtec: Criminality, Corruption, Incompetence, and Inexperience”), also by Kamps.

A comprehensive April 2022 to the present compilation of every Beyond Nuclear web post about resistance to Holtec’s zombie reactor restart scheme at Palisades, as well as the “Small Modular Reactor” new build scheme there, is entitled “Newest Nuclear Nightmares at Palisades.”

Beyond Nuclear has also long battled Holtec’s highly radioactive waste consolidated interim storage facility targeted at southeastern New Mexico (and also Interim Storage Partner’s CISF, targeted just 40-some miles to the east, on the New Mexico state line, in Andrews County, Texas). See related postings at:

Radioactive Waste/Centralized Storage (2022 to the present), and Radioactive Waste/Centralized Storage (2009-2022).

Similar resistance against an earlier Holtec dump, targeting the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, can be found here.

--

Kevin Kamps
Radioactive Waste Specialist
Beyond Nuclear
7304 Carroll Avenue, #182
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912

Cell: (240) 462-3216

ke...@beyondnuclear.org
www.beyondnuclear.org

Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abolish both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic.