Hello to NRWC Members,
Our colleague Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear is asking for our help. This is a sign on for groups as well as individuals. Details below.
Marilyn Elie
Date: Mon, Sep 19, 2022, 11:08 AM
Subject: Help us stop a billion-dollar bailout for the zombie Palisades nuclear plant–Group and individual sign-ons welcome by Thurs., Sept. 22, 7pm ET
To: Kevin Kamps <kevin@beyondnuclear.org>
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
Holtec International, the company that is pushing the proposed Holtec CISF spent nuclear fuel radwaste dump in New Mexico, is the new corporate owner of the shutdown Palisades Nuclear Power Plant on the Lake Michigan shore in southwestern Michigan.
Palisades shut down permanently — or so we thought — in May of this year. Besides providing extremely expensive electricity, Palisades had a controversial run. From the beginning, the plant was plagued with control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) leaks in the reactor building which plant owners could never solve. It was ranked by the NRC as the second most embrittled reactor vessel in the industry, making it unusually susceptible to sudden injections of cold water and rupture in the event of a core overheating accident. The two concrete storage pads near Lake Michigan for holding spent nuclear fuel storage casks for decades don’t meet NRC seismic standards. One defective spent fuel canister in particular has stored high-temperature irradiated fuel in an unstable fashion left unresolved for nearly 30 years.
Despite this history, Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer announced in June that she was going all out to spend hundreds of millions of state and federal tax dollars to put Palisades back on line. Holtec has applied to the U.S. Department of Energy for a 5 year bailout totaling perhaps more than a billion dollars, and the Governor has promised an undisclosed sum of additional money from the state’s coffers to support the plant.
A bailout for this already-shutdown reactor with its troubling operational record is unlawful, but the politics surrounding the bailout request appear to be tilted in Holtec’s favor. Governor Whitmer, a Democrat running for re-election, is a good friend of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who is herself a former governor of Michigan, and a Democrat.
PLEASE SIGN YOUR GROUP ON TO OUR OPPOSITION LETTER, which is linked below in .pdf or .odt formats. Please provide us a contact name, organization name, city, state and a contact email. Individual signons are also welcome with name, city, state and email. You don’t need to be from Michigan.
https://www.dropbox.com/t/gZfXP8CcPvZaJAu3
We need your help to stop the zombie Palisades reactor bailout by this Thursday, September 22 at 7 p.m. Eastern time so we can head off DOE Secretary Granholm’s expected decision around October 1, 2022.
To sign-on, please email Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear and Don’t Waste Michigan at <kevin@beyondnuclear.org> the information requested above.
Please spread the word to others who might also sign-on. Many thanks.
Terry Lodge
—
Kevin Kamps
Radioactive Waste Specialist
Beyond Nuclear
7304 Carroll Avenue, #182
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912
Cell: (240) 462-3216
