Nuclear ‘Renaissance’ Recalls Past Boondoggles, Legacy of Failures
Yet another nuclear power “renaissance”? Again? The industry and its friends in high places would like us all to believe so. But, besides the fact that “relapse” would be a better word choice, we’ve also seen this bad horror flick before.
Anyone recall the George W. Bush administration’s attempted nuclear power relapse? Of some three-dozen gigantic new reactors proposed, only two—Vogtle 3 & 4—ever made it into operation. Albeit seven years behind schedule, and more than double the price tag Southern and Georgia Power predicted in 2012, more than $35 billion instead of “just” $15 billion. Of course, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) had predicted, as cited in Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force Report of May 2001, that such new reactors would “only” cost $2.5 billion each, not more than $17.5 billion each! Hence, $12 billion in federal loan guarantees, and “nuclear tax” surcharges on ratepayers’ bills, were required—private capital wouldn’t touch it.
COMMENTARY
The rest of those proposed reactors have simply been canceled at various stages of development. Many never broke ground, including Fermi 3 in Michigan, despite license approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to construct and operate. Others ended half-built or less, as at Summer 2 and 3, contributing to the bankruptcy of century-old Westinghouse, and near-bankruptcy of century-old Toshiba. Summer 2 and 3’s cancellation represented a $9 billion or more loss to the ratepayers of South Carolina, many of whom are low income and/or African American. They will be paying for this fiasco on their electric bills for decades—long after a small handful of corporate execs finish their short time behind bars for fraud—with no electricity in return.
Of course, that nuclear “renaissance” going belly up just echoed earlier booms gone bust. Recall the Forbes editorial of February 11, 1985, entitled “Nuclear Follies,” which stated: “The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale. The utility industry has already invested $125 billion in nuclear power … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that most of the money has been well spent.”
Kevin Kamps
Scores, even hundreds, of reactors were abandoned at various stages of development in the past 50+ years. This included Midland Units 1 and 2, abandoned after being 85% and 50% built, due to safety-significant buildings sinking into the ground, a nuclear Leaning Tower of Pisa. By 1983, Consumers Energy had spent nearly $4.5 billion—$13.75 billion adjusted for inflation, expressed in 2023 dollar figures. It is the largest infrastructure fiasco in Michigan history. Whereas Richard Nixon had touted “Project Energy Independence,” envisioning a thousand reactors across the U.S. by the year 2000, “only” 135 were built. Of these, some never made it to full power operations, such as Shoreham. Most of the burden of the $6 billion wasted (in 1989 dollars, which would be $15 billion in 2023)—fell on Long Island ratepayers: a 3% surcharge was added onto electric bills for 30 years, to pay off the monumental price tag.
Along the same lines, the five-reactor Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) defaulted on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds in 1983 ($7 billion in 2023 dollars), one of the largest such defaults in American history. Hence, WPPSS became known as “Whoops”!
But, despite the lessons that should have been learned, here we go again, with a propaganda-, lobbying-, and campaign contribution-driven nuclear industry joy ride, perhaps at a scale unlike any before. So-called “Small Modular Reactor” (SMR) schemes have proliferated, despite the sinking of the flagship “UAMPS” project, NuScale’s in Idaho, with the cancellation of eight SMRs, the first certified design. This happened despite massive subsidization. Most recently, NextEra has wisely dismissed SMRs as not “too cheap to meter,” but rather too expensive to matter.
Some have gone so far as to propose restarting closed reactors. Holtec’s zombie scheme at Palisades in Michigan is unprecedented, but others—as at the infamous Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and Duane Arnold in Iowa, which nearly had a derecho disaster in 2019—are seriously considering joining the zombie reactor parade. Holtec has also proposed SMRs at Palisades, as well as at the long closed and decommissioned Big Rock Point site in northern Michigan, making the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan a leading-edge microcosm of the current attempted nuclear relapse across the country.
Holtec’s Magical Thinking in the Great Lakes State
In spring 2022, those of us who had watchdogged Palisades for decades—a proud tradition of resistance there, that even pre-dated its groundbreaking in 1967—breathed a huge sigh of relief, when then-owner Entergy pulled the plug, shutting the reactor for good. We had dodged so many radioactive bullets over the years. Although not everyone has—elevated rates of cancer, including childhood cancer, are reported in the area, for one thing.
Entergy had planned to close Palisades since 2016, although it took till 2022—the up to 57% above market rates power purchase agreement (PPA) it got then-governor (now Energy Secretary) Jennifer Granholm’s Michigan Public Service Commission (MPSC) to bless was just too lucrative to end early, safety risks be damned.
On May 20, 2022, Entergy finally called it a day, 11 days earlier than scheduled. Palisades’ latest in 50 years of ongoing Control Rod Drive Mechanism seal leaks took place, the worst such operating experience in industry. But by then, we already had plenty of evidence for trouble brewing.
I had already been butting heads with Holtec for nearly a quarter-century at that point. This included working with industry and NRC whistleblowers regarding widespread, safety-significant quality assurance violations on Holtec’s highly radioactive waste containers. It also included our environmental and environmental justice coalition’s successful defeat of the Private Fuel Storage, LLC monitoried retrievable storage facility for commercial irradiated nuclear fuel, targeting the tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in western Utah: Holtec would have provided the 4,000 containers for shipping and storing 40,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste there. And of course we’ve been resistsing Holtec’s proposed consolidated interim storage facility in southeastern New Mexico from the get-go on Nuclear Fool’s Day (April 1), 2017, when the license application was announced.
Holtec’s implication in serial bribery attempts included a conviction at Browns Ferry, Alabama. CEO Krisha Singh then lied about it, under oath, on his application for $260 million in State of New Jersey tax breaks, which Holtec used to build its production facility in Camden (the AG of NJ is still trying to claw that ill-gotten taxpayer money back). Thus criminality entered the picture, in addition to such other scandals as Singh accusing his own African and Puerto Rican American workforce in Cambden of laziness and drug addiction, sparking angry protests by social justice groups like the NAACP.
Given all that, when it became known in late 2020 that Holtec was attempting to take over Palisades, supposedly to decommission it, we got to work. We knew the company could not be trusted. When the related Federal Register Notice was published in February 2021, our environmental coalition met NRC’s arbitrarily short 20-day deadline to intervene. But we were then kept waiting for 17 months, without a peep from the agency. Tellingly, Holtec announced its takeover of Palisades on June 28, 2022—more than two weeks before the NRC got around to telling us to go jump in a Great Lake, that our intervention had been rejected, yet again.
But Singh had already floated the trial balloon of building four Holtec SMR-160s at Palisades, in an April 8, 2022 ExchangeMonitor interview: “Meanwhile, Holtec would also consider similar SMR projects at some of its other decommissioning sites such as the Palisades plant in Michigan, Singh said Tuesday.
However, he said the company would not propose advanced reactors for some decommissioning sites—particularly New York’s Indian Point and Massachusetts’s Pilgrim plant—because of local resistance. “They would burn us in effigy if we even said that, never mind build one,” Singh said.”
I responded, at a Palisades Community Advisory Panel meeting in South Haven, days later, “over my dead body.” And oh, by the way, in a letter to the editor of the Benton Harbor-St. Joe Herald-Palladium, “[a]ctually, our forté has been street theater featuring the tarring and feathering of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant owner Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, but we can be flexible.”
(In early December, 2023, Holtec would abruptly change its new build scheme at Palisades to two SMR-300s, instead, with little to no explanation why. But clearly, so-called “small modular reactors” are growing bigger; 300-MW reactors are not so “small.” The Big Rock Point reactor in Michigan, which operated from 1962 to 1997, was “only” 67 MWe, and yet released more than 3 million curies of hazardous radioactivity into the environment, worse than some reactors 15 times its size. Fermi Unit 1, a liquid metal sodium-cooled, plutonium-breeder reactor, also “just” 67 MWe in size, had a partial core meltdown on October 5, 1966, and “we almost lost Detroit”—the title of John G. Fuller’s iconic book of 1975, and Gil Scott-Heron’s haunting 1977 song. Holtec’s SMR-300s would be 4.5 times larger. “Small” does not mean beautiful when it comes to atomic reactors. And the M should probably stand for mythical, rather than modular, as critics assert!)
Then, on April 20, 2022, Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, first floated the trial balloon of not letting the old Palisades reactor close either, after all. This echoed former Michigan governor, now Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm’s earlier call to not close Diablo Canyon, California in 2024-2025, even though Pacific Gas & Electric had initiated the shutdown agreement in the first place, many years earlier. California governor Gavin Newsom, then did a complete 180, advocating for continued operations, even though he’d earlier been at the table for, and signed onto, PG&E’s 2016 shutdown agreement with certain environmental groups, labor unions, and host municipalities.
Holtec marked its takeover of Palisades on June 28, 2022 by doubling down on its SMR new-build scheme there, and also announcing it was targeting Palisades’ sibling reactor site—Big Rock Point, a part of the package deal, also on the Lake Michigan shore, 250 miles north, between Charlevoix and Petoskey—with additional SMRs. Big Rock Point had closed in 1997, was decommissioned over the next nine years, and was declared by NRC as releasable for unrestricted use, even though significant radioactive contamination had been left behind, not to mention highly radioactive waste with nowhere else to go.
But Entergy had certified permanent cessation of reactor operations at Palisades on June 13, 2022, terminating the operating license. NRC later docketed and acknowledged this, including in a letter addressed to me personally.
So we were left wondering, from April 2022 onward, what company was going to swoop in and restart Palisades. MPSC commissioner Katherine Peretick was quoted in the press at the time using just such mysterious language. After all, Holtec was a decommissioning firm, with no reactor operations experience, right?
As we would later find out, by July 5, 2022—just a week after taking ownership—Holtec had secretively applied to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for many billions of dollars in bailouts, to restart Palisades instead of decommissioning it, as promised. Holtec and Whitmer wouldn’t go public with their heavily subsidized restart scheme until more than two months later. Then, on Sept. 9, 2022, headlines blared that Holtec itself was the mystery company behind the zombie reactor restart. The decommissioning ruse was but a bait and switch trick, a con job.
We would, over a year later, obtain Holtec’s 42-page Palisades restart bailout application and strategy document submitted to DOE, via a Freedom of Information Act request we filed with the State of Michigan. Similar FOIA requests we made to DOE and NRC at the same time have gone largely to entirely unresponded to, up to the present.
Holtec’s magical thinking is laid down in black and white in this document which we were never meant to see. I put out a press release on October 16, 2023, featuring the most remarkable aspects of Holtec’s revelations, meant for DOE’s eyes only. I entitled it “Newly Uncovered Document Reveals Holtec’s Secretive, True Plans for Palisades and other Shutdown Nuclear Sites: Application to DOE for Unprecedented Reactor Restart Reveals Ulterior Motive to Build Small Modular Reactors at All Decommissioning Sites; Details $10.7 Billion+ in Bailouts for ‘Nuclear White Elephant’ Schemes.”
For one thing, it seems Krishna Singh had changed his mind about possibly targeting Indian Point and Pilgrim with SMRs someday, too, just a few months after assuring Exchange Monitor he wouldn’t dare. Holtec confided in DOE: “Despite the success in decommissioning, we are not loath to admit that we are unabashed promoters of nuclear energy … in fact, one of the principal reasons Holtec has been acquiring aging nuclear plants is because such sites are near-perfect locations for building the SMR-160 reactors that the company has been developing for over a decade.”
(Patrick O’Brien, director of government affairs and communications at Holtec, came right out and said it in a July 10, 2024 Washington Post article about the Palisades and Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart schemes: “This is not something we expected to do,” O’Brien said during a panel at a recent industry conference in Las Vegas, where he said Holtec is also getting asked about a plant that closed in New York in 2021 and one in Massachusetts that closed in 2019. “It is not just Palisades. Now at other plants we are decommissioning we are getting asked, ‘Can you restart Indian Point? Can you restart Pilgrim?’ Maybe. Probably not. We’ve cut up the reactors. But does that preclude us from putting in new reactors? I don’t think so.” Steve Kent has coined a phrase for these flipsides of the current attempted nuclear relapse—closed reactor restarts and/or SMR new builds at retired nuclear power plant sites—“re-nuclearization.”)
With messianic zeal, Holtec entitled its DOE Civil Nuclear Credit (CNC) application “Palisades Resurrection Grant Request.” (emphasis added) The company described its unprecedented scheme as not only a national, but even international symbol. Holtec stated: “We believe that with a strong spirit of collaboration this project, with each party performing its role, can well become a shining talisman for the global nuclear industry.” (emphasis added)
Such hyperbole and magical thinking by Holtec and its zombie reactor restart supporters, far from benefitting the region, is endangering it.
Holtec also stated: “Successfully reviving Palisades … would be an unprecedented achievement that would not only rescue a proven clean energy generator for Michigan from demise, but it would re-energize the fledgling nuclear operators in Western Europe where the move to shutter nuclear plants has been even more pernicious than the US.”
But Germany’s hard won shutdown of its last atomic reactors in early 2023 was a tremendous environmental victory, supported by not only the Greens and Social Democrats, but also the Conservatives. It embodies a political consensus, in response to nuclear power’s hazardous radioactive pollution, nuclear waste dilemma, and exorbitant expense, as well as to its severe dangers, as exemplified by the Chornobyl and Fukushima nuclear catastrophes.
But the nearly thousand-page FOIA response we obtained contained other revelations in addition to Holtec’s bailout application and re-nuclearization strategy for Palisades. MPSC staffer Kevin Krause, referring to “Beyond Nuclear et al,” in an email to MPSC Commissioner Peretick (who has enthusiastically supported Palisades’ restart from the very beginning), brushed off environmental watchdogs’ safety concerns, saying: “The unsafe claims are claims these organizations have been claiming for a long time and the NRC has looked at them before.”
The Upton Sinclair quote from 1935 comes to mind: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” His or her.
Krause is correct that our coalition has warned repeatedly about Palisades’ grave risks for many decades now. But NRC is an infamously captured regulator, long the industry’s lapdog, not its watchdog. NRC oversight can more often be defined as “an unintentional failure to notice or do something,” rather than “the action of overseeing something.” “Unintentional” oversight gives NRC too much benefit of the doubt, assuming mere incompetence, rather than complicity with industry. The Japanese Parliament concluded in 2012 that collusion between the supposed, so-called safety regulatory agency, the industry, and government officials, was in fact the root cause of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe. There has long been such collusion in spades at Palisades.
For one thing, NRC has repeatedly weakened pressurized thermal shock (PTS) regulations, over decades, in order to accommodate ever more risky continued operations at the worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country, namely Palisades. For State of Michigan officials to incuriously accept NRC’s flippant assurances of safety is inviting disaster.
Investigative reporter Jeff Donn’s post-Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, four-part Associated Press series, “Aging Nukes,” cited PTS as a top example of NRC’s dangerous, ongoing, decades-long regulatory retreat.
Whitmer, the Michigan state legislature, MPSC, our Michigan U.S. congressional delegation, and even DOE, should not fall for the lie that NRC is somehow on top of safety at Palisades. NRC is the enabler of ever more alarming risk-taking, as by Holtec at Palisades.
But even MPSC’s Krause expressed skepticism that Palisades could actually be restarted, a sentiment shared by other MPSC staffers, as revealed a number of times in the FOIA response documents. Krause, in a Sept. 9, 2022 email he gave the subject line “Palisades – you won”t believe this…..,” wrote several other MPSC staffers that “I talked to a few people this afternoon, and we are in uncharted territory. It is not even clear that keeping the plant open is possible from a licensing perspective.” Krause’s email came in response to the “buzz,” news coverage about Holtec’s surprise announcement that day that it had abandoned its decommissioning plans at Palisades, instead was pursuing an unprecedented restart scheme, and had already secretively applied, more than two months earlier, for $2 billion in DOE CNC funding alone, all with Whitmer’s enthusiastic support.
Krause’s word choice is apt. But the uncharted territory is not limited to bureaucratic regulatory approvals. Holtec’s unprecedented Palisades restart scheme represents uncharted territory in terms of the unacceptable risks to health, safety, security, environment, and vast amounts of public funding.
Other watchdogs share this concern. The July 10 Washington Post article also reported: “The United States is “taking our aging reactors into uncharted territory,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS]. “Cutting corners on nuclear safety and increasing the risk of a Fukushima disaster in the U.S. is not likely to be a winning strategy for enhancing public confidence in the technology.” (emphasis added)
Lyman should know. He literally wrote the book on this—Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster—in 2014, along with retired UCS nuclear engineer David Lochbaum, as well as Susan Q. Stranahan, an award-winning journalist who was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 meltdown.
In summer 2023, in a Crain’s Detroit Business interview, Lyman also referred to the “mindless advocacy” of Gov. Whitmer, and others, for the Palisades restart, as they did not even know the safety status of critical systems, structures, and components.
In terms of MPSC’s seemingly unconcerned, unquestioning approvals for PPAs that gouge ratepayers, the agency serves the public all right—up for dinner to the likes of Palisades owner/operators Entergy (2007-2022) and Holtec (2025-2051).
It’s astonishing that Holtec and NRC are betting the farm on the dangerously old Palisades reactor. It was a notorious, poorly performing nuclear lemon for most of the past half-century, with ever increasing age-related degradation risks, now made even worse by the apparent lack of active safety maintenace by Holtec for the past two and a half years, and counting.
And it’s dumbfounding that DOE, Whitmer, Michigan state legislators, and the PPA customers, the Wolverine/Hoosier rural electric co-ops, have fallen for NRC and Holtec’s assurances of reliability and safety, given their incompetence, complicity, collusion, and corruption.
Keeping with Holtec’s most Tolkienesque hyperbole, its Palisades ‘shining talisman’ is a dark ring, forged with malevolent metallurgy. Holtec’s ravenous dragon would not only devour our vast treasures, but would risk radioactive ruination for the entire region. Or, to shift to a Halloween season metaphor, the zombie nuclear “monster on the beach”—as its immediate neighbors have called it—already has one undead head, and would grow yet more, the SMRs, unless we stop it.
Money Grabs Galore
Thus far, Holtec has gotten $300 million in grants for the Palisades restart scheme approved by the State of Michigan, despite repeated protests by a broad Great Lakes State environmental coalition.
Holtec has also recently gotten final approval for $1.52 billion in loan guarantees approved by DOE, 52% more than Holtec had asked for two years earlier. Another $1.3 billion has been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—again, $330 million more than was reportedly initially applied for—to reimburse rural electric co-ops (Wolverine in Michigan, Hoosier in Indiana and Illinois) for 25% of a PPA for Palisades’ future antipcipated electricity supply, from 2025 to 2051, if not beyond that. Holtec hopes to gouge ratepayers even worse than the up to 57% above market rates PPA Entergy had previously enjoyed at Palisades for 15 years. Will the co-ops re-apply for yet additional USDA bailouts in the future?
These federal subsidies were authorized by President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). An analysis by NIRS has estimated the IRA includes more than a third of a trillion dollars in potential nuclear power subsidies. Although touted as a climate mitigation bill, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service analysis reported about the 2022 law: “The total amount of nuclear funding in these IRA measures alone ($383 billion) is potentially greater than the total reported amount of climate spending in the entire bill ($369 billion). By comparison, the total cost of production and investment credits for which renewable energy sources could qualify is only $61 billion—less than the Nuclear PTC [Production Tax Credit], and one-sixth of the total spending and financing that fossil fuel and nuclear power plants could receive.”
The massive level of federal and state subsidization being handed over to the nuclear power industry is reflected in the giddiness of the head of the nuclear engineering department at the University of Michigan:
“You’re starting to see a lot of states transition to a position where they’re supportive of nuclear,” said Todd Allen, chair of the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences department at the University of Michigan. “And compared to 30 years ago, the amount of federal support for nuclear is unbelievable.” (Emphasis added)
He was quoted in Stateline on February 12, 2024, in an article entitled “Federal money could supercharge state efforts to preserve nuclear power: A plant in Michigan might become the first to reopen after closing.”
It is unbelievable, in a shocking and horrifying way. But even this $3.12 billion in public bailouts approved thus far for the Palisades restart is but the tip of the iceberg. Holtec has requested more than $5 billion in additional taxpayer and ratepayer bailouts towards the zombie reactor restart scheme alone.
Despite its reported denials to the contrary notwithstanding, I think Holtec is very likely still seeking $2 billion in Civil Nuclear Credits (CNCs). $6 billion in CNCs were authorized by President Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. $1.1 billion were approved for Diablo Canyon in 2022, alongshide another $1.4 billion in State of California grants toward indefinitely extended operations at the twin, 40-year old Pacifiic Coast reactors, surrounded by high-risk earthquake fault lines, that were supposed to have retired this year and next.
Holtec had applied for $2 billion in CNCs for the Palisades restart in July 2022. On Novbember 18, 2022, Holtec publicly announced DOE had turned down its application. This may have been due, in part, to a large environmental coalition’s repeated warnings to Secretary Granholm that awarding CNCs to Holtec for Palisades’ restart would be illegal. CNCs were authorized by Congress—unfortunately—to bail out reactors at risk of closing, not ones like Palisades that had alrerady closed.
A year ago, DOE also announced the awarding of a billion dollar Hydrogen Hub grant to a consortium of 70 entities in Michigan, one of which is Holtec. The question is, how big a cut will Palisades make off with?
As mentioned above, Holtec hopes to replicate or expand the Palisades PPA upwards, in terms of exceeding market rates, compared to the Entergy-Consumers Energy PPA of 2007-2022, on which it is modeled. Holtec has estimated gross sales revenues of $412.5 million per year, or more, from 2025 to 2051. That would be $10.725 billion in gross sales, not accounting for planned refueling outages, and other unplanned outages, such as breakdowns and safety related shutdowns. If 57% or more of that is above market rates, then some one-third or so of those revenues would simply be a “nuclear tax,” or surcharge on ratepayers’ electric bills, for no other reason than to enrich Holtec, with Whitmer’s MPSC’s blessing. Thus, this would represent yet another public subsidy, this time coming from ratepayers, amounting to some $3 billion or more.
Our watchdog coalition also alleges that Holtec has looted some tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from Palisades’ Decommissioning Trust Fund (DTF), ratepayer money meant for facility dismantlement and radioactive contamination clean up at the Lake Michigan shoreline site. NRC has acknowledged only $53,000 misspent there for restart scheme activities. But our alarmed question remains. Holtec has repeatedly admitted it has done little to no decommissioning work at Palisades. It has likewise done little to no spent nuclear fuel management, nor site restoration — non-decommissioning activities which NRC, outrageously, regularly rubberstamps approval for spending DTF money on. So, ON WHAT has $164 million from the Palisades DTF been spent by Holtec in 2022-2023 alone? We allege, on the restart scheme, which is the “talk of the town,” after all, with decommissioning now indefinitely delayed.
But Holtec has also applied to DOE for $7.4 billion in loan guarantees to design certify, construct, and operate two SMR-300s at Palisades, and one or more at Big Rock Point. This funding is leftover from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and appropriations quietly passed by Congress on Dec. 23, 2007, when most Americans were celebrating the holidays, a traditional time of year for nuclear lobbyists to ram through wish-list legislation. These three Holtec SMRs alone, on Lake Michigan’s eastern shore, could easily gobble up that entire amount.
At more than $8.5 billion for the restart scheme alone, and nearly $7.5 billion for the SMR new builds scheme, Holtec has requested more than $16 billion in giveaways of hard earned public (taxpayer and ratepayer) dollars, just on the Great Lakes State’s western shore. This is, of course, in addition to the very large-scale subsidies previously poured into Palisades and Big Rock Point, dating back to the early- to mid-1960s.
Opportunity Costs
Dr. Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford University, citing his 2019 analysis he still stands by, serves as an expert witness for the environmental coalition opposing Palisades’ restart. Jacobson has testified that “a fixed amount of money spent on a new nuclear plant means much less power generation, a much longer wait for power, and a much greater emission rate than the same money spent on WWS [wind, water, and sunlight] technologies.” This dynamic also applies at zombie reactors like Palisades. Closed on May 20, 2022, the earliest date by which Holtec claims it can restart Palisades is August 2025. However, that optimistic goal seems to be slipping to October or even December 2025, even according to Holtec at various points in time recently.
But Jigar Shah, director of the DOE Loan Programs Office, in late September 2024 stated Palisades’ restart could take “a couple of years,” meaning a year longer than Holtec claims.
Does Shah’s statement refer to delays related to recently revealed, very serious indications of steam generator tube degradation at Palisades? I discuss this particular issue in more detail below.
Amory Lovins, an advocate for “natural capitalism,” a founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and now also a professor at Stanford, has warned not for years but for decades that, with limited time and money at hand to avert climate catastrophe, we should reduce greenhouse gas emissions as cost-effectively and quickly as possible. This would be done by promoting energy efficiency, renewables, and storage, not by additional rounds of nuclear bailouts. When asked about Holtec’s schemes at Palisades, on a recent webcast press conference entitled “Why Latest Nuclear Revival is Already Doomed,” Lovins stated: “It’s nuts. They’ve never run a reactor, that’s a particularly troubled one, and it’s just politics and subsidy-chasing as far as I can see.”
Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, authored “Carbon-Free, Nuclear-Free: A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy” in 2007. It was the first technical study on the feasibility of generating all U.S. energy from fossil fuel- and nuclear-free sources, including renewables such as wind and solar, combined with efficiency and storage.
Dr. Makhijani concluded then that, by the year 2030 (that is, within a quarter-century), fossil fuels and nuclear power could be phased out of the U.S. economy, and replaced with carbon-free and nuclear-free alternatives, for the same percentage of our gross domestic product currently devoted to those dirty, dangerous, and expensive energy sources. This could be accomplished with no more carbon-free, nucledar-free technological breakthroughs required. What was then a hypothesis about the single largest economy on Earth in 2007 has since become more of a reality, as in the fourth largest national economy in the world, and the largest in Europe—Germany—which has entirely phased out nuclear power, and is making significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use by maximizing renewables, storage, and efficiency in a transition plan measured in just a few decades. If Germany can accomplish this, so too can the U.S., which has vastly more renewable energy resources at its disposal.
As former Vice President Al Gore said in his award-winning 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, about impending climate catastrophe unless we stop it, all that is missing is the “political will.” As Dr. Jacobson has put it —No Miracles Needed: How Today’s Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air. Proceeding even further down the nuclear road as a supposed climate solution could well prove an irrevocable, fatal mistake. Our future is in renewables, such as wind and solar, storage, and efficiency—if we hope to have one.
Restarted Reactor Risks to Health, Safety, Security, and the Environment
In spring 2006, Palisades’ intial owner/operator (from 1967-2007), Consumers Energy, admitted to the MPSC that the atomic reactor had a long list of severely degraded, safety-significant systems, structures, and components. Watchdogs had already known for a long time before that about its worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country, something that NRC was finally dragged, kicking and screaming, to adknowledge more than a decade ago now. But the inclusion of the need for “[r]eactor vessel [closure] head replacement,” after the Davis-Besse, Ohio near-miss of 2002, and of the need for “[s]team generator replacement” for the second time at Palisades, added to our causes for concern. The latter issue became more worrisome after the steam generator tube failure at San Onofre, California, which rightfully led to the twin reactors’ permanent shutdowns in 2013.
Consumers also mentioned “fire protection requirements,” an admission that became more stark as Palisades suffered significant whistleblower scandals a decade later. Already severely overworked security guards were forced to also do fire watch patrols. Rather than do so, some guards simply falsified the paperwork, saying they had performed patrols that they in truth had not, even though fire represents 50% of the meltdown risk at a reactor.
This was but one of numerous security breaches at Palisades over the years. In 2007, Esquire exposed that Palisades’ security chief was a fraud: a chimney sweep whose hobby was to write action thriller screenplays, William Clark had lied his way into the job, falsely claiming to be a one-man death squad, that shadowy U.S. government agencies would regularly send overseas to do their dirty work.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, one of Palisades’ extremely overworked security guards had a nervous breakdown on the job while heavily armed. On the first anniversary of the 2001 attacks, Palisades’ security alerted the wrong local law enforcement agency, in response to a convoy of suspicious cars deeply penetrating the facility. By the time the sanfu was corrected, the cars were long gone. Although no attack was launched that day, Palisades’ vulnerability was nonetheless revealed.
Consumers also mentioned “[c]ontainment coatings and sump strainers.”
The company’s point was it could not afford to fix all these many problems, but the prospective new owner, with the second largest nuclear power plant fleet in the country, had the workfoce experience, and economy of scale, to get the jobs done, so Consumers’ argument went.
The problem is, Entergy did not fix any of those problems, despite owning and operating Palisades from 2007 to 2022. And despite the killing it made that entire time, charging up to 57% above market rates on its PPA. Why not? Because, as is typical, NRC did not require it.
Instead, especially after 2016, because it intended to close Palisades, Entergy ran the reactor into the ground. NRC approved multiple exemptions from, and waivers of, safety-significant inspections and maintenace, over the course of several years, citing the reactor’s imminent retirement. This has exacerbated the risks of restart.
“Coatings and sump strainers” at Palisades still represent a risk of debris blocking Emergency Core Cooling System coolant flow during a reactor core overheating incident. A public meeting hosted by NRC, with Holtec, on October 24, 2024 revealed that this Generic Safety Issue (GSI)-191 won’t even be resolved until long after the zombie reactor restart, which Holtec has variously claimed will take place in August, October, or December 2025. Holtec has requested that probabilistic risk assessment be applied—that is, avoiding actually fixing the problem in hopes that the chance of the worst happening is relatively low, an oft exploited “get out of jail free card” industry and NRC complicitly like to play. But what were the chances of a triple meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi, Japan? One in a million X one in a million X one in a million is 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000, also known as 1e-18, or one in one-quintillion. And yet tragically it did happen, beginning on March 11, 2011.
Consumers should have also mentioned Palisades’ chronic control rod drive mechanism seal leaks, the worst such operating experience in industry. The first leak happened in 1972, just one year into operations. The most recent leak happened on May 20, 2022—this was why Entergy closed Palisades for good 11 days earlier than scheduled. No root cause has ever been determined, nor any meaningful corrective action taken. Instead, mere BAND-AID replacements have taken place. One, a decade ago, exposed nearly 200 workers—including some women of child-bearing age—to an average radiation dose of 2.8 Rems, in just a one-month job. (The international limit for nuclear worker exposure to radiation on the job is 2 Rem per year.) Some workers’ doses may have been much worse—workers were wearing their radiation badges incorrectly, leading to suspicion that it was done intentionally.
All of those pathways to reactor core meltdown are still relevant at Palisades, and will grow worse, if and when Palisades is allowed to restart, and sail ever deeper into the uncharted waters of age-related degradation risk.
In fact, NRC recently publilshed a rare Preliminary Notification of Occurrence, after Holtec’s steam generator inspection in early Septebmer revealed extensive tube degradation. Our anti-restart environmental coalition’s expert witness, Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer of Fairewinds, has pointed out that accelerated degradation is likely due to Holtec’s neglecting to institute chemically-preservative wet layup.
He has also warned that additional neglected maintenance, as on pumps and valves, as well as the turbo-generator, could lead to unacceptable safety risks. Palisades is so old, its turbo-generator is oriented towards the control room. This flawed design could result in deadly shrapnel penetrating the control room during full power operations, should its neglected maintenance result in a mechanical explosion.
This is a real world risk. On Christmas Day 1993, Fermi 2’s turbo-generator shaft mechanically exploded. This resulted in two million gallons of radioactively contaminated water being dumped into Lake Erie.
Regarding the degraded steam generators, Gundersen pointed out in his October 7 declaration filed as part of the environmental coalition’s intervention petition/request for hearing that “at least 700 additional tubes…must be plugged due to metal corrosion. These were as many tubes as had been plugged during the previous 20 years of operating the aged Palisades reactor designed in 1965.”
Gundersen concluded: “During my 53 years of professional experience, I am unaware of any steam generator, with so many previously known and newly identified flaws, that has not been replaced.”
Despite this, Holtec does not plan to replace the steam generators, which it has estimated would cost $510 million. Instead, it merely plans to plug or sleeve degraded tubes. It also plans to un-plug 600 tubes that had previously been plugged in 1990.
Gundersen has concluded that “[t]he overall design of the Palisades reactor is not licensable to the 21st century standards.”
Mycle Schneider, the initiator and Convening Lead Author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Reports, said the same to the Wall Street Journal in an article published August 26, 2024.
Of course, Holtec’s scheme to build and operate two new SMR-300s immediately adjacent to the restarted zombie reactor would pile on yet more risk. To breakdown phase risks at the zombie that had previously operated 51 years, and went largely to entirely unmaintained since its “permanent” shutdown 2.5 years ago, would be added the break-in phase risks at the new reactors. Chornobyl Unit 4 in Ukraine in 1986, Three Mile Island Unit 2 in Pennsylvania in 1979, and Fermi Unit 1 in Michigan in 1966, are some infamous examples of break-in phase risks at brand new reactors. Multiple reactors on the tiny, 432-acre Palisades site would also raise the specter of Fukushima-style, domino-effect, cascading, multiple meltdowns.
What would the consequences be for a single reactor meltdown at Palisades? In the 1982 CRAC-II report (Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences, also known as the Sandia Siting Study, or NUREG/CR-2239), commissioned by NRC and carried out by the Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Sandia National Lab, shocking casualties were predicted: a thousand peak early deaths (acute radiation poisoining); 7,000 peak radiation injuries; and 10,000 latent cancer fatalities. $52.6 billion in property damage was also predicted.
Adjusting for inflation alone, to 2023 dollar figues, property damage would now surmount $168 billion. But how do you put a price tag on the Great Lakes, 21% of the world’s surface fresh water, drinking and irrigation water supply, and so much more, for 40+ million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a very large number of Indigenous Nations?
As AP investigative journalist Jeff Donn reported in his 2012 series “Aging Nukes,” populations have soared around U.S. reactors since 1982, so casualties would now be correspondingly worse, as more people live in harm’s way.
In short, Palisades’ restart and SMR new builds would risk radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Radioactive Waste Risks
In addition to averting meltdown, more good news about Palisades’ “permanent closure” by Entergy on May 20, 2022 was that no more highly radioactive waste would be generated there. Since 1971, nearly 900 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel has piled up at Palisades. Currently, about a third is in outdoor dry casks; two-thirds is still stored in Palisades’ indoor wet storage pool.
Palisades’ dry cask storage has been extremely controversial since 1993. The fourth cask to be loaded, in June 1994, was quickly acknowledged as having welding defects, in violation of its technical specificiations. Consumers Energy had pledged to return the contents of any problem cask into the storage pool, but talk is cheap. It soon realized the challenges of attempting to do so, as warned about by watchdogs, were all too real. Four decades have passed, and defective cask #4 remains fully loaded with irradiated nuclear fuel.
In February 1994, NRC dry cask storage safety inspector, Dr. Ross Landsman, warned that the cask pad at Palisades—just 150 yards or less from the waters of Lake Michigan—was in violation of NRC earthquake liquefaction rules. In 2005, Landsman warned that Palisades’ second pad, a little further inland and on somewhat higher ground, violated NRC earthquake transmission rules. Regardless, both pads are still in use, holding many dozens of fully loaded casks.
Holtec will almost certainly use its own casks to someday offload the pool, as well as contain newly generated waste from the zombie reactor and SMRs. For more than two decades, whistleblowers, including NRC’s Landsman (and, until his death, Commonwealth Edison/Exelon’s Oscar Shirani), have warned about Holtec’s widespread quality assurance violations on its maunfacture of highly radioactive waste storage/transport canisters. It is unclear, and doubtful, that Holtec and NRC have done anything to rectify these QA violations.
In 2005, Palisades had a serious indoor wet storage pool incident. A contractor, in a hurry to leave for vacation, improperly set a crane. While lifting a 107-ton, fully loaded cask from the pool, the crane’s emergency braking system activated, fortunately, due to the improper setting. The cask dangled, partially above the pool’s surface, for two days. But Palisades’ inexperienced personnel very unwisely attempted to override the emergency brake, in order to keep to schedule. Luckily, they failed to override the emergency brake. Had they succeeded, the heavy load could have crashed into the pool’s floor, potentially breaching it, and draining some or all of the cooling water. If that had happened, the uncovered, uncooled irradiated nuclear fuel could have caught fire within hours, and large amounts of escaping volatile, hazardous radioactivity, such as Cesium-137, would have fallen out into the surrounding region’s environment, downwind, downstream, up the food chain in one of Michigan’s most agriculturally productive areas, and down the generations. As at Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 in spring 2011, it appears that sheer luck saved the Great Lakes from a radioactive catastrophe in 2005.
Once restarted, the zombie reactor would resume generating around 15 metric tons per year of irradiated nuclear fuel. And, according to Drs. Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane, President Obama’s U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and NRC chairs, respectively, SMRs, depending on the particular design, would generate 2 to 30 times the high-level radioactive waste as do current reactors, due to the loss of economy of scale.
Holtec’s 2020 Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report revealed that it plans to barge Palisades’ highly radioactive wastes on the surface waters of Lake Michigan, into the Port of Muskegon. There, they would be transferred onto trains, and hauled to its consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) in New Mexico. Beyond Nuclear and our environmental allies have battled Holtec’s CISF scheme (as well as Interim Storage Partners’ in Texas) for a well over a decade, first in the NRC licensing proceedings, and then federal courts of appeal. The court battle has now moved to the U.S. Supreme Court. A single sunken barge shipment, whether due to accident or attack, could spell radioactive ruination for Lake Michigan, drinking water supply for 16 million people in four states along its shores.
Conclusion
To paraphrase a joke that then-U.S. Rep., now U.S. Senator, Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) once told in 2006 regarding nuclear loan guarantees, Adam Smith, George Orwell, and Rachel Carson are rolling so fast in their graves, they could be connected to turbo-generators, connected to the electric grid, and qualify for clean energy production tax credits!
Holtec’s unprecedented, unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and extremely risky for health, safety, security, and the environment zombie reactor restart scheme should be nipped in the bud. Other would-be nuclear zombies, such as Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania, and Duane Arnold in Iowa, should be similarly slain.
Holtec’s SMR new builds at Palisades, and Big Rock Point, should also be blocked.
Renewables such as wind and solar, energy storage, and energy efficiency can readily replace the Palisades zombie reactor’s 800 MW-e, as well as the 600 MW-e from Holtec’s proposed SMRs on the same site. They can do so relatively quickly, very cost-effectively, and genuinely safely, securely, and cleanly, as well as reliably.
Those driving these high-risk nuclear nightmare joy rides should wake up, before the worst happens.
—Kevin Kamps has served as radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear since 2007. He worked in a similar role at NIRS starting in 1999. Kamps has also served as a board of directors member of the statewide, anti-nuclear group Don’t Waste Michigan for more than 30 years, representing his hometown Kalamazoo chapter.
https://www.powermag.com/blog/nuclear-renaissance-recalls-past-boondoggles-legacy-of-failures/
