The Palisades atomic reactor, highly radioactive waste storage, and radioactively contaminated site, located in Covert Township, Van Buren County, on Southwest Michigan's Lake Michigan shorelineDear Friends and Colleagues,
Help protect the irreplaceable Great Lakes (21% of Planet Earth's surface fresh water, and 84% of North America's!) against radioactive risks. On Thursday, February 4th, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) published a Federal Register Notice (larger format version, with NRC cover letter preceding it) announcing a 30-day countdown clock for the submission of public comments re: the transfer of licenses and ownership, from current owner Entergy Nuclear to proposed new owner Holtec International, for the Palisades and Big Rock Point nuclear power plant sites. They are located on the Lake Michigan shore of West Michigan, in Covert Township near South Haven, and in Charlevoix near Petoskey, respectively. (Here is the smaller format version, as the Notice actually appeared in the Fed. Reg. on Feb. 4th.)
The Fed. Reg. Notice references Holtec's December 23, 2020 "Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Activities Report" for Palisades (PSDAR), and "Palisades Site-Specific Decommissioning Cost Estimate," (DCE). It also references Holtec's Dec. 23rd License Transfer Application.
Holtec proposes to do the decommissioning (facility dismantlement and radiological cleanup) of the Palisades site, and highly radioactive waste (irradiated nuclear fuel) management at both sites. (NRC approved the supposed completion of decommissioning at the closed Big Rock Point atomic reactor, and release of the site for unrestricted use, in 2006, a decision that a broad environmental coalition, including Nuclear Information and Resource Service, Don't Waste Michigan, and Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes have protested, due to lingering hazardous radioactive contamination of the soil, groundwater, and Lake Michigan sediments, which pose an ongoing risk on-site and to the ecosystem, food chain, and drinking water supply downstream.)
The deadline for public comments on this proposal is Monday, March 8, 2021 at 11:59pm Eastern (10:59pm Central).
HOW TO SUBMIT COMMENTS:
Comments can be submitted online here: <https://www.regulations.gov/document/NRC-2021-0036-0001>. (The Fed. Reg. Notice is reproduced at this link, as well.)
[As the NRC has instructed: Address questions about Docket IDs in Regulations.gov to Stacy Schumann; telephone: 301-415-0624; e-mail: Stacy.Schumann@nrc.gov. For technical questions, contact the individual listed in the FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT section of this document. <linked here>]
Comments can be emailed to: <Hearing.Docket@nrc.gov>. If you do not receive an automatic email reply confirming receipt, then contact NRC at 301-415-1677.
Comments can be faxed to: Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission at 301-415-1101.
Comments can also be snail mailed to the following address, but must be postmarked by March 8th or earlier: Secretary, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DC 20555-0001, ATTN: Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff.
[As NRC has stated: For additional direction on obtaining information and submitting comments, see “Obtaining Information and Submitting Comments” in the SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION section of this document. <linked here>]
The NRC encourages electronic comment submission through the Federal Rulemaking Web Site (https://www.regulations.gov). But if you do email, fax, or snail mail your comments to NRC, please include a reference to Docket ID NRC-2021-0036 in your comment submission(s), such as at the very top.
There is no limit to how many comments you submit. You can submit multiple sets/rounds of comments.
As comments are public documents, do not include personal information in your comments -- such as phone numbers, email addresses, street addresses, etc. -- that you do not want publicly posted. NRC does not edit out such personal information before posting comments publicly.
WHAT COMMENTS TO MAKE?:
Feel free to cut and paste the following verbatim. Or just use it as a model, and rewrite it in your own words.
"Of course Palisades should shut for good, by May 31, 2022 at the latest. It never should have been constructed and operated in the first place. For health, environment, safety, and security's sake, it should have been shut not years, but decades ago. So we welcome the fact that after May 31, 2022, a reactor core meltdown can no longer happen at Palisades. We also celebrate the fact that no more high-level radioactive waste will be generated.
However, the radioactive risks will continue, even after reactor shutdown. There is significant contamination of the entire site, with hazardous radioactivity and toxic chemicals. There is also a vast amount of high-level radioactive waste stored on-site, where it will almost certainly remain not for years, but for decades to come.
It is unacceptable to put crooked, untrustworthy companies like Holtec and SNC-Lavalin in charge of radiological clean up and high-level radioactive waste management at Palisades. They will do as little radiological clean up, and will take as many shortcuts on high-level radioactive waste management, as the complicit Nuclear Regulatory Commission will allow. They will then put the lion's share of the Nuclear Decommissioning Trust Fund in their pockets, as pure profit. The radioactive risks -- lingering contamination, irradiated nuclear fuel -- left behind at Palisades after that will continue to haunt the public forevermore into the future.
For these reasons, Palisades' (and Big Rock Point's), licenses should not be transferred to Holtec and its decommissioning partner SNC-Lavalin."
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Also consider the following additional ideas, to help you write your own comments. Or, feel free to copy these ideas verbatim -- that is what they are provided for.
First and foremost, 30 days is far from enough time for the public to prepare meaningful comments on this complex license transfer application. The risks of tritium contamination on the Palisades site will persist for more than a century. The risks of cesium-137 contamination on the Palisades site will persist for several centuries. The risks of plutonium-239 contamination on the Big Rock Point site will persist for 240,000 years. The risks associated with the highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel stored at both sites will persist for a million years, or longer, into the future (Nuclear Energy Institute versus U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, case filed 2002, ruling issued July 9, 2004). Thus, an additional 60 days for the submission of public comments is a reasonable request, especially considering the ongoing burdens concerned citizens are facing due to the ongoing, deadly Covid-19 pandemic. Exacerbating the public's need for more time to comment is the fact that NRC has been posting many hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand, documents in its Palisades docket, that are 25-years old, or older. These documents could well contain relevant information, such as re: past radioactive and/or toxic chemical spills on the site, contamination that must be cleaned up during the decommissioning phase. 60 additional days of public comment opportunity on the proposed license transfer will give not only the concerned public more time to analyze the newly posted documents for relevance, but will give Holtec more time to reconsider whether it really even wants to take over this contaminated site.
But in addition, we make the following technical, environmental, public health, safety, and security-related comments:
(1.) In 2006, as part of its resistance to the 20-year license extension at Palisades, a coalition of 25 local grassroots, multi-state regional, and even national groups, representing 200,000 Michigander members and supporters alone, submitted broad comments to NRC on its related Draft Environmental Impact Statement. See the comments'
executive summary, here; see the
complete comments, here. The comments addressed a comprehensive array of concerns, including re:
(a.) security;
(c.) hazardous radioactive discharges to the environment, a risk to the food chain and drinking water supply downwind and downstream;
(d.) ever worsening global warming;
(e.) revenues (lack thereof) for the host municipalities, like Covert Township;
(f.) ratepayers (and/or taxpayers) left holding the bag;
(g.) threatened, endangered, or candidate species put at risk from radioactivity and/or toxic chemical releases, whether acute due to accident, or chronic due to leakage of contamination;
(h.) Indigenous Nations' interests, such as protection of burial sites, and other cultural properties, protection of treaty rights, etc.;
(i.) embrittled and aged safety significant systems, structures, and components;
(j.) emergency preparedness in surrounding communities;
(k.) Environmental Justice;
(l.) compliance with Canadian-U.S. International Joint Commission commitments, including Boundary Waters Treaty obligations.
None of Palisades' various owners/operators (Consumers Energy, Nuclear Management Corp., Entergy), nor NRC, have ever adequately addressed any of these concerns, if they've addressed them at all. Many, to most, to all, remain relevant, even post-reactor shutdown, during the decommissioning phase.
(As but one example, re: embrittled and aged safety significant systems, structures, and components, above, Palisades, and the Point Beach Unit 2 reactor across Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, are close to tied for the worst neutron embrittled reactor pressure vessels (RPV) in the U.S., vulnerable to pressurized thermal shock catastrophic failure; Palisades' RPV therefore contains vital physical data that should be comprehensively analyzed ("autopsied"), for lessons learned to be applied to Point Beach Unit 2's application for 80 years of operations; Palisades also has age-degraded steam generators, and an age-degraded lid; each safety significant system, structure, and component should be carefully studied, to provide data for science-based safety regulatory decisions at other reactors of similar age and design to Palisades, rather than buried as "low" level radioactive waste in leaking ditches, as at Waste Control Specialists, Texas, their irreplaceable safety significant data lost forever).
Therefore, we re-submit our coalition comments from 2006, 15 long years later, and demand that the current owner Entergy, the prospective new owner Holtec, and the supposed, derelict "safety regulator" NRC, address our concerns, and implement our recommended mitigations. If not, Holtec's proposed takeover of the Palisades site should not be approved.
As public comments, we endorse the concerns and contentions raised in the interventions, including:
(a.) Changes in land use, effects of historical site events, and inadequacies of the 2006 (20-Year License Extension) Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement all comprise new information which necessitates additional National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) supplementation -- specific areas of concern include: historic high Lake Michigan water levels;
(b.) radioactive steam generator storage, handling, transport, and disposition, including potential for barging on Lake Michigan and risk of accidental sinking causing drinking water disasters;
(c.) historic cooling towers overflow, and consequent spread of radioactive contamination from the flooded RadWaste Building;
(d.) needed characterization of historic tritium spillage, leakage, and releases across the site, and implications for Lake Michigan and inland aquifer drinking water supplies over time;
(e.) earthquake safety regulation non-compliant dry cask storage concrete storage pads;
(f.) discrepancies re: the estimated number of casks needed to store highly radioactive Greater-Than-Class-C "low" level radioactive wastes, such as radioactively activated reactor pressure vessel internals;
(g.) dry cask storage repackaging dilemmas, such as due to failed or failing casks and/or canisters, transfers needed for transportability and/or compliance with repository disposal requirements, etc. (a current lack of cask-to-cask transfer capability, to be exacerbated once the wet indoor storage pool is dismantled during decommissioning);
(h.) the defective fourth cask to be loaded in summer 1994, never unloaded in 27 years and counting, despite the Palisades owner's pledge, under oath in federal court, that problem casks would be unloaded and replaced;
(i.) unconsidered high burnup irradiated nuclear fuel implications (more radioactive, thermally hotter, more brittle);
(j.) Holtec International and SNC-Lavalin, as well as their subsidiary corporations, Holtec Decommissioning International, LLC (“HDI”) and Comprehensive Decommissioning International, LLC (“CDI”) individually and collectively lack the requisite corporate character, corporate culture and corporate ethics to be licensed, or allowed by contractual privity, to undertake any aspect of the decommissioning of Palisades Nuclear Plant and the management, transportation and disposal of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel from Palisades and Big Rock Point (see "
Holtec & SNC-Lavalin Company Profiles," by Nancy Vann, Safe Energy Rights Group; see also
Holtec and
SNC-Lavalin "Radioactive Skeletons in the Closet" annotated bibliographies by Beyond Nuclear);
(k.) Applicants' request for the NRC to grant an exemption to use Nuclear Decommissioning Trust funds for irradiated nuclear fuel management and site restoration activities is contrary to law and regulation, would present an undue risk to the public health and safety, and is not consistent with the common defense and security -- as ELPC has noted, no other source of funding is presented in the License Transfer Application;
(l.) as ELPC has argued, the Application and PSDAR are deficient under Title 10 Code of Federal Regulations, Parts 50.75(b)(1) and (e)(1)(i), because they improperly assume a 2% rate of return for the Nuclear Decommissioning Trust fund;
(m.) as ELPC has contended, the Application is deficient because Holtec offers only the Decommissioning Trust Fund to support Its financial qualifications;
(n.) and similarly, as the MI AG has argued, Holtec fails to show financial qualification to qualify for a license transfer, by failing to provide adequate decommissioning financial assurance and/or adequate funding for spent nuclear fuel management, in violation of 10 C.F.R. §§ 50.33(f) and (k)(1), 50.40(b), 50.54(bb), 50.75(b)(1) and (e)(1)(i), 50.80(b)(1)(i),50.82(a)(8)(vii), and 72.30(b) because Holtec’s PSDAR and decommissioning cost estimate underestimate license termination and spent fuel management costs;
(o.) and as the MI AG has contended, the PSDAR impermissibly assumes Holtec will receive a regulatory exemption authorizing the use of decommissioning trust monies for site restoration and spent fuel management. Since Holtec has yet to receive such an exemption and has shown no other source of funding for site restoration and spent fuel management, it fails to satisfy NRC regulations at 10 C.F.R. §§ 50.54(bb) and 72.30(b).
(3.) We also object to Holtec's reliance on, and assumption of, its proposed irradiated nuclear fuel Consolidated Interim Storage Facility (CISF) scheme, targeting the majority minority (Hispanic, Indigenous) State of New Mexico. Not only is Holtec's CISF proposal a major violation of Environmental Justice, it also violates the 2012 Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future Final Report's recommendation that CISFs must meet "consent-based siting." Non-consent to Holtec's CISF has been clearly and repeatedly expressed by: the All Pueblo Council of Governors; the Navajo Nation; New Mexico's governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham; the State Land Commissioner, Stephanie Garcia Richard; most of New Mexico's U.S. congressional delegation, including Deb Haaland, nominated by President Biden to become his Interior Secretary; many New Mexico state legislators; numerous New Mexican industry associations and small businesses; a large number of New Mexican environmental, environmental justice, and nuclear watchdog organizations; and a growing groundswell of New Mexico residents. Similarly, we object to Holtec's reliance on, and assumption of, the Yucca Mountain highly radioactive waste dump-site scheme, targeting Western Shoshone land in Nevada. The Western Shoshone, the State of Nevada, its U.S. congressional delegation, and more than a thousand environmental groups in Nevada and across the country, as along Yucca-bound high-level radioactive waste/Mobile Chernobyl transport routes, have clearly expressed non-consent with the environmentally unjust Yucca dump scheme, which violates the U.S.-Western Shoshone "peace and friendship" Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863, the highest law of the land, equal in stature to the U.S. Constitution itself.
Although prepared in the context of a separate proceeding -- the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) environmental scoping for yet another 20-year license extension at the Point Beach atomic reactors on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shore -- Physicians for Social Responsibility-Wisconsin has done some very valuable, helpful write ups, providing tips that could help you prepare your own comments, as well as answering Frequently Asked Questions. See them posted online here: <
https://psr-wisconsin.org/point-beach-eis>.
Thank you very much for taking action to protect the Great Lakes, by submitting comments in this proceeding by the deadline. Please spread the word!
For an Nuclear-Free Great Lakes,
---Kevin Kamps
Beyond Nuclear, radioactive waste specialist
Don't Waste Michigan, board of directors member (Kalamazoo chapter)
Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination, advisory board member
--
Kevin Kamps
Radioactive Waste Specialist
Beyond Nuclear
7304 Carroll Avenue, #182
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912
Cell: (240) 462-3216
kevin@beyondnuclear.orgwww.beyondnuclear.orgBeyond 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.
Palisades atomic reactor, Covert Twp., MI, on Lake Michigan shoreSee our action alert for ideas on what to write and how to submit comments by the Monday, March 8 deadline at 11:59pm Eastern. We have good momentum in opposition to the crooked companies' (Holtec and SNC-Lavalin) takeover from Entergy of the Lake Michigan shoreline reactor, after its planned shutdown for good by May 31, 2022. On February 24, the coalition Beyond Nuclear-Don't Waste Michigan-Michigan Safe Energy Future, represented by legal counsel Terry Lodge, chief researcher Michael Keegan, and expert witness Robert Alvarez, intervened with NRC's ASLB, against the transfer. So too did Michigan's Attorney General Dana Nessel, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center. Help protect the Great Lakes: submit comments to NRC by March 8th!
March 5, 2021
