Media Statement by Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear
Contact: Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist, Beyond Nuclear, (240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org
| COVERT TWP., MI, and WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 26, 2025–“What a nuclear nightmare this is for our entire region. Holtec, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Governor Whitmer, the Department of Energy (DOE), state and federal legislators, and others are playing radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shore. The Japanese Parliament concluded that the root cause of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe was collusion, between the safety regulatory agency, company, and government officials. We have such dangerous collusion in spades at Palisades. This is a monstrous nuclear experiment, and area residents are the guinea pigs. Holtec’s Palisades zombie reactor restart scheme is not only unprecedented, but also unneeded, insanely expensive for taxpayers and ratepayers, and very risky for health, safety, security, and the environment. We’ve dodged many radioactive bullets at Palisades since it first fired up in 1971. How many more can we dodge, as Holtec rolls the dice on this potentially deadly gamble, aided and abetted by NRC’s ready rubber stamps, and enabled by federal and state bailouts of $3.12 billion, and still counting, from an unwitting public? But not everyone has dodged those radioactive bullets since 1971. There has long been evidence of elevated cancer rates in the area. Immediately next door to Palisades to the south, at Palisades Park Country Club, a 105-year old resort community of 200 cottages, a shocking 50 thyroid cancer diagnoses have been alleged, not to mention other cancers. Thyroid cancer is so exceedingly rare, there should not be a single case in such a small population of mostly part-time residents. Palisades’ so-called ‘routine releases’ of hazardous radioactivity during ‘normal operations’ could well be the cause. FEMA has patted itself on the back for ramming eight years of neglected radiological emergency preparedness exercises and trainings into just the past few months. And yet, regular news headlines are decrying FEMA’s free fall under the Trump administration’s mass firings and budget cuts. Is southwest Michigan and beyond ready for a Chornobyl- or Fukushima-scale nuclear catastrophe, which is now a distinct possibility at the restarted Palisades? Even if evacuations go smoothly, which they will not, area residents could well never get to return home again, due to the lingering radioactive contamination downstream, downwind, up the food chain, and down the generations. Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. Through a rookie error — Holtec has never operated a reactor, let alone repaired one, nor restarted one — the company severely further damaged already age-degraded steam generators that should have been entirely replaced two decades ago. Now it has slapped some Band-Aid fixes on a very large number of severely cracked tubes, while unplugging 617 tubes that were plugged 35 years ago, as a precaution against damaging vibrations, for which Palisades’ steam generator design is infamous. Our environmental coalition legally challenged these inadequate shortcuts on safety. Our expert witness, Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with more than 50 years of relevant experience, testified he has never seen steam generators so degraded that have not been entirely replaced. He played a key role in the permanent shutdown of two reactors at San Onofre in southern California in 2013, due to severe steam generator tube degradation. The rupture of a single tube, which is all but guaranteed after Palisades restarts, will release a certain amount of hazardous, ionizing radioactivity into the environment. But a cascade of a large enough number of tubes could cause a full-blown reactor core meltdown, unleashing catastrophic quantities of hazardous ionizing radioactivity, which would then blow with the wind, fall with the rain, flow in Lake Michigan, and bio-accumulate, wherever it falls out over time. Close calls with ruptured tubes at Indian Point, New York in 2000, as well as Byron, Illinois and San Onofre, California in 2012, have been forgotten all about at Palisades.But the steam generators aren’t the only safety-critical system, structure, or component at the breaking point, after 51 previous problem-plagued years of operations, from 1971 to 2022. The reactor pressure vessel is the worst neutron-embrittled in the country, and perhaps the whole world, at increasing risk of pressurized thermal shock through-wall fracture.The reactor vessel closure head should have been replaced 20 years ago, but never has been, despite the cautionary tale of the Davis-Besse, Ohio ‘Hole in the Head Fiasco’ near miss in 2002. Why wasn’t the lid replaced? Because NRC has never required it. The sumps and strainers could become quickly blocked in an emergency, as calcium silicate containment insulation coating dissolves into a sludge of Elmer’s Glue consistency, clogging core coolant system flow. This problem has been known about for decades. Holtec has asked NRC to allow it to kick the can down the road for years or decades longer on fire protection upgrades, as it already has done for a half-century, after the infamous Browns Ferry Unit 1 fire in Alabama in 1975. Fire is the root cause of half of all reactor core meltdown scenarios. Palisades had very serious fire protection scandals nine years ago, brought to light by security guard whistleblowers, who were then scapegoated, with no long-needed upgrades implemented. Palisades has had numerous high-profile security breaches as well, even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., which included consideration by Al Qaeda of targeting multiple nuclear facilities. Domestic terrorist groups have also attempted to attack nuclear power plants in the U.S. Palisades has had the worst operating experience in industry with control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) seal leaks, beginning in 1972, and continuing until 2022. Despite this, the root cause has never been determined, and corrective action has never been taken to prevent it from recurring. Just over a decade ago, complete replacement of degraded CRDM seals led to nearly 200 workers, including women of childbearing age, being exposed to unnecessarily high radiation doses. As exhausting as the list above is, it is not exhaustive. Palisades has yet more pathways to meltdown. Holtec’s unprecedented restart of the supposedly closed for good Palisades reactor will put the entire Great Lakes Basin, and all who call it home, at existential risk, 95% of the United States’ surface freshwater, 84% of North America’s, and 21% of the world’s, drinking water for more than 40 million people. Holtec has hidden behind regulation-free zone decommissioning status since it took over at the supposedly closed for good Palisades reactor on June 28, 2022. This included a waiver from radiological emergency preparedness that NRC should never have granted, given the high risks of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel still stored on-site. In fact, from December 2024 to April 2025, Holtec performed a large number of transfers of this high-level radioactive waste from the indoor wet storage pool, to outdoor dry storage casks. The movement of such heavy loads over the pool is inherently dangerous, and thus should not have been done with no evacuation plan on the books, and one that had not even been subjected to trainings or exercises in many long years. Holtec promised to decommission Palisades, from 2020 till September 9, 2022, when it announced, alongside Gov. Whitmer, that it intended to restart Palisades instead. Thus, Holtec perpetrated a big lie, a con job, and a bait and switch trick. What is Holtec lying about now? That the restart will be safe? I guess we will see. It’s ironic Holtec has already declared victory, in that multiple License Amendment Requests (LAR) have not yet received official approval by NRC. This includes an LAR to further delay decades overdue fire protection upgrades. It seems Holtec is quite confident in NRC’s complicity as to the final outcome. Because so much is at stake, we will continue to resist Holtec’s Palisades restart. If and when the NRC Commissioners reject all our numerous safety and environmental appeals of agency staff and licensing board approvals, we will take our appeal to federal court at the earliest opportunity.” A one-stop-shop for Beyond Nuclear website posts about resistance to Palisades — both to Holtec’s zombie reactor restart, as well as its ‘Small Modular Reactor’ new builds scheme on the same tiny site — dating back to April 2022, when the schemes were first floated by Gov. Whitmer (restart) and Holtec CEO Krishna Singh (“SMR” new builds), can be found here.### |
| 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. Info@beyondnuclear.org. www.beyondnuclear.org. |
