What you can do to help shutdown Palisades before it melts down

June 9, 2013
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U.S. Sens. Levin and StabenowThere are many actions you can take to help shutdown Palisades before it melts down.

For example, you can contact U.S. Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow (see photo, left), both Michigan Democrats, and senior Democratic Party leaders (committee chairs) in the U.S. Senate. Their full contact information is listed below. Read on for ideas on what you can say to them.

Urge them to do all they can to force Palisades' shutdown, for safety's sake.

Urge them to work together to request an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) into the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) regulatory rollbacks on safety standards, enabling the age-degraded Palisades atomic reactor to keep operating. Specifically, urge them to launch a GAO investigation on Palisades' embrittled reactor pressure vessel, at risk of rupturing due to pressurized thermal shock if the emergency core cooling system is ever activated. This would lead to a loss of coolant accident, reactor core meltdown, and catastrophic radioactivity release, potentially killing and injuring tens of thousands, and causing over $100 billion in property damage downwind and downstream.

Palisades has the worst embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S., as admitted by senior staff at a Feb. 29, 2012 public meeting in South Haven. Michael Keegan of Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes documented that Palisades had violated NRC safety standards just 10 years into its operations, by 1981. In June 2011, the Associated Press pointed to reactor pressure vessel embrittlement as the top example of NRC weakening safety standards in order to enable dangerously degraded atomic reactors to keep operating.

A coalition of dozens of Michigan environmental groups asked for this GAO investigation from Sens. Levin and Stabenow in spring 2006 -- yes, 7 years ago. Concerned citizens and environmental group representatives again asked them to do this in early 2012. Yet they never have.

You could also urge Sen. Stabenow to hold hearings in the Senate Agriculture Committee, which she chairs, regarding the risks to Michigan's agricultural economy from a catastrophic radioactivity release at Palisades.

You could also urge Sen. Stabenow to call for hearings on the Water and Power Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on which she serves, to look at the risks to Lake Michigan -- source of drinking water for tens of millions -- if Palisades were to unleash a Fukushima-like catastrophe on its shoreline.

Here are the two Senators' contact information:

U.S. SENATOR DEBBIE STABENOW:

Click on this link for Sen. Stabenow's Webform, where you can send her an email. 

Washington, D.C. Office

Senate Hart Office Building #133, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510; phone (202) 224-4822; Fax (202) 228-0325.

Flint/Saginaw Bay Office

432 N. Saginaw St, Suite 301, Flint, MI 48502; Phone: (810) 720-4172

Article originally appeared on Beyond Nuclear (https://archive.beyondnuclear.org/).