Beyond Nuclear - Decommissioning

Terry Lodge, Toledo, Ohio-based attorney and legal counsel for the environmental coalition comprised of Beyond Nuclear, Don't Waste Michigan, and Michigan Safe Energy Future, has filed a motion with the Secretary and Commissioners of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It requests 60-day extensions on the deadline dates for requesting a hearing and intervening in the proceeding initiated by Holtec's proposal to take over the licenses at Entergy Nuclear's Palisades atomic reactor in Covert, MI, and at Entergy's supposedly decommissioned (but still radioactively contaminated) Big Rock Point nuclear power plant site in Charlevoix, MI.

See the motion here, which includes a declaration by Michael Keegan of Don't Waste Michigan.

The reason for the request is the flooding of documents into the Palisades docket at NRC's ADAMS database. ADAMS is short for Agencywide Documents and Access Management System. As Michael Keegan has declared, around a thousand or more documents -- 98% of them 25 years old or older -- have been added in just the past several weeks into the Palisades docket at ADAMS.

These quarter-century old documents could prove highly relevant to the intervention filing, currently due Feb. 24th, after an arbitrarily short NRC imposed strict 20-day deadline. They could also be very relevant re: public comments, currently due on March 8th. Terry Lodge has asked for 60 day extensions, out to April 25th, and May 7th, respectively.

The relevance could be documentation of radioactive contamination of the site's soil, groundwater, etc., which should be comprehensively cleaned up during decommissioning. The relevance could also be documentation of problems with dry storage casks for highly radioactive waste. Palisades has been plagued for a half-century with radioactive leaks, dry cask mishaps, and many additional problems, of significant radioactive risk to Lake Michigan and residents and ecosystems downwind and downstream. Apparently, NRC has been very remiss re: transparency and accountability, withholding significant amounts of potentially relevant documentation from public access for more than 25 years!