Environmentalists Object to Yet More Safety Shortcuts at Palisades Nuclear Plant: Holtec International has recently requested a flurry of significant regulatory waivers for unprecedented restart of permanently closed reactor
Michael J Keegan
|
Michael Keegan, chair, Don’t Waste Michigan, Monroe, MI, mkee...@comcast.net Terry Lodge, attorney, Toledo, OH, tjlo...@yahoo.com Wallace Taylor, attorney, Cedar Rapids, IA, wtayl...@aol.com (Reporters seeking an interview with the coalition's expert witness, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, please contact Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps, above, to schedule one.) |
| Environmentalists Object to Yet More Safety Shortcuts at Palisades Nuclear Plant |
| Holtec International has recently requested a flurry of significant regulatory waivers for unprecedented restart of permanently closed reactor
|
| COVERT TWP., MI and WASHINGTON, D.C., OCTOBER 6, 2025–As part of its three-and-a-half-year-long scheme to restart the closed Palisades atomic reactor, over the past couple months, and especially in just the past few weeks, Holtec International has applied for multiple relief requests from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
These regulatory relief requests have to do with safety-significant systems, structures, and components, including the Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV) Closure Head and Vent Lines, Control Rod Drive Mechanisms (CRDMs), InCore Instrumentation, Primary Coolant System Piping, and Pressurizer Nozzles. They involve numerous modifications to penetrations through the RPV Closure Head, as well as piping branch connections, and welds, including structurally-significant ones, involving dissimilar metals.
Links to the documentation about the various relief requests are posted here. (To access any of the documents, simply click on the “ML numbers,” or the URLs, that are provided.) The links click through to the documents as posted at NRC’s ADAMS (Agencywide Document Access and Management System) docket.
“The regulatory pathway to restart that Holtec and NRC have cobbled together since 2022 has been very chaotic from the get-go, but this recent piecemeal flurry of relief requests shows the safety risks are increasingly off the chart,” said Terry Lodge, Toledo, Ohio-based co-counsel for an environmental coalition intervening against Holtec’s scheme. “We’ve appealed NRC staff’s regulatory retreat to the agency’s Commissioners, and will continue to do so,” Lodge added.
The company argues – and the agency already appears to agree – that these regulatory relief requests do not rise to the level of License Amendment Requests (LARs). The coalition opposed to the unprecedented reactor restart could challenge LARs in NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB) proceedings, as they have done at every opportunity over the past two years. The coalition has also formally intervened against Holtec’s Exemption Request, and its License Transfer Request, as well as the adequacy of NRC’s environmental reviews, beginning in October 2023.
Palisades’ original owner, Consumers Energy, admitted to the Michigan Public Service Commission in 2006 that the Reactor Vessel Closure Head needed to be replaced. (See page 2 in Consumers’ presentation, posted here.) But Palisades’ next owner, Entergy, never did so during its 2007 to 2022 tenure, because NRC did not require it. Holtec has now requested numerous waivers as well, rather than replacing the severely degraded RPV Closure Head.
NRC’s regulatory retreat on this issue is all the more remarkable, given the near-miss at the Davis-Besse atomic reactor on northwest Ohio’s Lake Erie shore. The 2002 “Hole-in-the-Head” fiasco was described as the closest call to a reactor core meltdown since the Three Mile Island Unit 2 disaster of 1979, led to $33 million in federal fines, and cost utility FirstEnergy hundreds of millions of dollars in replacement power purchase costs due to the reactor’s years-long unplanned shutdown.
And, as documented by nuclear engineer David Lochbaum, retired director of the Nuclear Safety Program at Union of Concerned Scientists, Palisades has had many Control Rod Drive Mechanism (CRDM) seal leaks over the course of 50 years, from 1972 to 2022. It is the worst CRDM operating experience in industry. Rather than determine the root cause and take corrective action, Holtec, like its predecessors at Palisades, has requested waivers and plans mere “band-aid fixes” on this serious safety risk as well. See: <https://beyondnuclear.org/headaches-at-palisades-broken-seals-and-failed-heals/>.
Also, the coalition’s expert witness, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, with more than 50 years of relevant experience, has warned about Primary Coolant System Piping degradation, yet another self-inflicted wound, just like the steam generator tube degradation, due to Holtec’s incompetence at not implementing basic safety maintenance during Palisades’ own years-long shutdown after Entergy's decision to close the reactor for good on May 20, 2022. In fact, the latest CRDM seal leak led Entergy to permanently close Palisades 11 days earlier than scheduled.
The NRC staff have indicated they will complete their review of the relief requests by November 10, 2025, taking just three and a half months to perform what previously would have taken eight months.
“This is like FEMA and the Michigan State Police cramming eight years of radiological emergency preparations, exercises, and training into just a few months,” said Kevin Kamps of industry watchdog Beyond Nuclear, who resides in Kalamazoo, Michigan, 35 miles downwind of Palisades. “Rather than providing reasonable assurance of adequate protection of public health and safety, as required by law, NRC is instead allowing Holtec to pile up an already large and still growing number of shortcuts that could end in radioactive catastrophe for the entire Great Lakes region,” Kamps added.
“Holtec and NRC are complicit in attempting to block our ability to legally intervene against these most recently revealed safety risks,” said Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based attorney Wally Taylor, co-counsel for the coalition. “The only option left for us is to file an emergency enforcement petition, which, if the past is any indication, the agency is almost certain to reject in the end,” Taylor added.
The coalition has already filed an emergency enforcement petition with NRC. It objects to the agency allowing sleeving repairs to a very large number of degraded steam generator tubes, even before approval. In fact, the coalition’s intervention petition and request for a hearing, challenging the adequacy of sleeving, and calling for the steam generators to be entirely replaced, had not even yet been adjudicated by the NRC ASLB, when documentation was published revealing that the work had already been secretively performed.
In an interview published by WSJM on October 1, 2025, Holtec’s spokesman at Palisades, Nick Culp, expressed confidence that the federal government shutdown would have no impact on Holtec’s schedule to restart the reactor by the end of the year.
“That's quite a commentary on the adequacy of NRC’s oversight, and time commitment to ensuring the safety of the restart, that an open-ended government shutdown makes no difference,” said Terry Lodge, the coalition’s co-counsel.
The environmental coalition intervening against Holtec's unprecedented 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.
For more information, see Beyond Nuclear's "Newest Nuke Nightmares at Palisades, 2022 to Present." This is a one-stop-shop of web posts dating back to April 2022, when Holtec CEO Krishna Singh first floated "Small Modular Reactor" construction and operation at Palisades, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated restarting the closed-for-good reactor.
|
| Beyond Nuclear is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization. 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. The Beyond Nuclear team works with diverse partners and allies to provide the public, government officials, and the media with the critical information necessary to move humanity toward a world beyond nuclear. Beyond Nuclear: 7304 Carroll Avenue, #182, Takoma Park, MD 20912. In...@beyondnuclear.org. www.beyondnuclear.org. |
