Should Palisades Nuclear Plant In South Haven Get Restarted?

ANN ARBOR – Should the shuttered Palisades Nuclear Plant in South Haven along the shores of Lake Michigan get restarted? Two nuclear energy experts state an emphatic NO.

Joining Matt Roush and Mike Brennan on MITech TV are Arnie Gundersen who appears frequently on CNN as a nuclear energy authority, and Kevin Kamps from BeyondNuclear.org.

Palisades was sold in 2022 to Holtec to be dismantled. Instead Holtec has sought the permission of federal nuclear regulators to restart the facility. Below are their arguments again restarting.

Holtec’s Palisades closed “zombie” reactor restart scheme is unprecedented, certainly in the U.S. and likely in the entire world. It is unneeded—the lights have stayed on in Michigan since the reactor closed for good on May 20, 2022.

Holtec is inexperienced and incompetent. It has never operated a reactor, repaired one, built one, nor restarted one as problem-plagued as Palisades. Holtec’s self-inflicted wound of steam generator tube degradation is a “rookie error” that risks a meltdown. Holtec skipped basic safety maintenance — wet layup on the steam generators — from 2022 to 2024, and made an already serious problem severely worse.

Holtec’s proposed steam generator “repair” plan, 80% of around 3,000 degraded tubes will be sleeved; 20% of around 3,000 degraded tubes too damaged to sleeve will be plugged; and more than 600 tubes plugged 35 years ago during initial installation to prevent damaging vibrations, will be unplugged, at best represents inadequate Band-Aid fixes. There have never been steam generators this badly degraded that were not entirely replaced. In fact, previous owner Consumers Energy admitted, to the Michigan Public Service Commission in 2006, that both steam generators at Palisades needed to be entirely replaced. But new owner Entergy never did so, from 2007 to 2022, because the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not require it.

Now Holtec has no stated current plans to replace them either, although Holtec implied to the U.S. Department of Energy in 2022 that they needed to be replaced, and requested $510 million in federal taxpayer bailouts to do so. The $3.12 billion of — mostly federal taxpayer, but also state taxpayer and ratepayer — bailouts Holtec has already gotten, and the more than $5 billion in additional public bailouts it has requested, to restart Palisades, is a national level scandal of waste, fraud, and abuse.

Each of 380 so-called “restored” jobs at a “resurrected” Palisades has cost $8.21 million in public bailouts, as compared to just $29,000, on average, per new job created by subsidies provided by the State of Michigan a couple years ago. In other words, for the same public investment, 283 jobs could be created in other economic sectors, for the cost of a single job “restored” at Palisades.

In addition to the degraded steam generators, Palisades has the worst neutron-embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country, and perhaps the world. It also has a degraded reactor vessel closure head, needing replacement since 2006. Palisades has sumps and strainers that are too small, and will be quickly clogged with dissolved calcium silicate containment coating, the viscosity of Elmer’s Glue, blocking emergency core coolant system flow.

Holtec has even asked permission to further delay implementation of fire protection upgrades at Palisades, that have been neglected for fifty years. All those pathways to reactor core meltdown mentioned above were acknowledged as risks at Palisades by previous owner/operator, Consumers Energy, to the Michigan Public Service Commission, in 2006. As exhausting as that list is, it is not exhaustive.

Palisades has also had the worst operating experience in the country with Control Rod Drive Mechanism seal leaks, yet another pathway to reactor core meltdown. What would a meltdown at Palisades look like? Consider Arnie Gundersen’s essay “Downstream,” written more than a decade ago, inspired by Palisades’ safety risks then, which have grown worse since.

We offer spokespersons from Holtec to appear on MITech TV to provide the company’s counter arguments.