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Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear, Board of Directors Member for Don't Waste Michigan (Kalamazoo Chapter), (240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org
"Holtec International announced today that, just a month after the U.S. Department of Energy turned down its first application for a Civil Nuclear Credit bailout to restart Palisades, it will apply for a second round opportunity of billion dollar or more federal bailouts. This outrageous and unprecedented scheme, to restart an atomic reactor that has permanently shut down, includes very serious risks to public health, safety, security, the environment, and pocketbooks. This zombie reactor nightmare at Palisades must come to an end, once and for all.
Neither Holtec, Energy Secretary Granholm, nor Governor Whitmer have explained why the first bailout application was rejected a month ago. For that reason, Beyond Nuclear and Don't Waste Michigan filed Freedom of Information Act requests with both the U.S. Department of Energy and the State of Michigan, demanding documentation explaining why Holtec's Palisades bailout application was denied. For more information, see: <https://beyondnuclear.org/coalition-foias-doe-and-state-of-michigan-re-why-palisades-was-denied-cnc-bailout/>.
Beyond Nuclear and Don't Waste Michigan's expert witness on Palisades safety matters, Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer at Fairewinds, is available for media interviews to discuss the very high hurdles, and astronomical expense, Holtec faces if its Palisades restart scheme goes forward. Gundersen's media availability statement, dated November 14, 2022, including his contact information, is pasted-in below.
This severely age-degraded reactor must remain shut down, lest its restart risk a catastrophic core meltdown. The Palisades atomic reactor, which operated from 1971 to May 20, 2022, has the worst embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S., which was at increasing risk of catastrophic failure due to pressurized thermal shock. To accommodate Palisades' operation for 51 years, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) simply weakened and rolled back the safety standards, multiple times over decades.
Palisades also has a severely degraded reactor lid, and worn out steam generators that needed replacement for the second time in the reactor's history.
All three of these safety-significant systems, structures, and components were major pathways to core meltdown, which an NRC commissioned report, CRAC-II (short for Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences, also known as the 1982 Sandia Siting Study or as NUREG/CR-2239) estimated would have caused a thousand peak early fatalities (acute radiation poisoning deaths), 7,000 peak early radiation injuries, 10,000 peak cancer deaths (latent cancer fatalities), and $52.6 billion in property damage.
When adjusted for inflation alone, property damages would have surmounted $150 billion in Year 2021 dollar figures. And as Associated Press investigative reporter Jeff Donn wrote in his four-part series "Aging Nukes," shortly after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe began in Japan in 2011, populations have soared around U.S. atomic reactors, so casualties would now be even higher. Donn cited reactor pressure vessel embrittlement and pressurized thermal shock risk as the top example of NRC regulatory retreat.
Thank goodness no such nuclear nightmare unfolded at Palisades during its 51 years of ever more high risk operations, but Consumers Energy (from 1971 to 2007) and Entergy (from 2007 to 2022) were willing to take those risks on the shoreline of the Great Lakes, drinking water supply for more than 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a very large number of Native American First Nations downstream and downwind, as well as up the food chain.
Holtec is also willing to take those risks, by repeatedly applying for a billion dollar or more bailout from the U.S. Department of Energy, and additionally demanding as much or more from State of Michigan taxpayers and/or electricity customers as well.
Just days after Holtec announced on November 18, 2022 that the U.S. Department of Energy had denied its bailout request, the agency approved a similar bailout request from Pacific Gas & Electric, for its Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. PG&E had long agreed and planned to close Diablo Canyon for good by 2025, but DOE's $1.1 billion federal bailout -- and the State of California's recently approved additional $1.3 billion state bailout -- mean serious safety risks at Diablo Canyon, as from earthquakes, could continue for years to come. After the $1.1 billion Civil Nuclear Credit bailout for Diablo Canyon, another $4.9 billion remains in the Energy Department fund for additional rounds of bailouts.
By definition, once the irradiated nuclear fuel has been removed from the core, a reactor meltdown cannot happen. This has been the case at Palisades since early June.
But the likely more than 700 metric tons of highly radioactive, forever deadly irradiated (euphemistically called spent or used) nuclear fuel, containing more than 1,800 pressurized water reactor assemblies, and comprising more than 150 million curies of hazardous radioactivity, still represent a very significant risk. The vast majority is still stored in the indoor wet storage pool, at risk of a loss of cooling water leading to a catastrophic radioactivity release to the environment. While transfer of irradiated nuclear fuel into dry cask storage represents an increase in safety, it involves the movement of very heavy loads over the pool, and must be done very carefully. In October 2005, a 107-ton transfer cask containing irradiated nuclear fuel dangerously dangled over the pool for two days, and was nearly dropped from its crane by operator error. Had that happened, the ensuing pool fire could have dwarfed even CRAC-II's casualties and property damage figures cited above, as Palisades' pool is not even located in a radiological containment structure. Recently, in its careless rush job to empty a storage pool, Holtec -- which took over at Palisades on June 28, 2022, with NRC's complicit rubber-stamp -- caused a radioactive water spill that doused and dosed a worker at its Oyster Creek, New Jersey decommissioning project. In 2018, Holtec's flawed dry cask storage design at San Onofre, California nearly caused a 50-ton loaded canister to fall nearly 20-feet.
For these and many other reasons, Beyond Nuclear, Don't Waste Michigan, and Michigan Safe Energy Future legally challenged Holtec's takeover of Palisades. But the NRC refused for 17 months to grant us our day in court, and then summarily told us to go jump in a Great Lake. We do call for expedited transfer of irradiated nuclear fuel out of the vulnerable pool, but not into Holtec's dubious and defective dry casks, but rather into safe and secure Hardened On-Site Storage, in order to protect health, safety, security, and the environment for the decades the irradiated nuclear fuel will likely be stuck at Palisades with nowhere to go. Palisades' restart would mean yet more high-level radioactive waste will be generated there, worsening already very serious ongoing risks.
Due to all the risks above, Governor Whitmer's unwise last-second scheme to bail out Palisades with billions of dollars of state and federal taxpayer money, in order to restart it for nine more years of operations, has to be stopped. We are happy Energy Secretary Granholm did so, by denying the federal bailout, a month ago. We call on Energy Secretary Granholm to do so again, as Holtec applies a second time.
Nearly a hundred environmental organizations, including 26 based in Michigan, wrote Governor Whitmer about their concerns with her Palisades bailout and restart scheme on June 8, 2022. On September 23, 2022, 68 environmental organizations wrote to Energy Secretary Granholm, expressing similar concerns, including the point that Palisades did not qualify for a Civil Nuclear Credit bailout, because it did not meet the requirements of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, nor even the Energy Department's own implementing regulations. This remains the case, so we urge the Energy Department to again reject Holtec's second bailout request.
In addition to the dangerously age-degraded Palisades reactor's bailout and restart being a non-starter, Holtec CEO Krishna Singh's other bait and switch -- to decommission Palisades, only to then construct and operate one or more so-called Small Modular (Nuclear) Reactors at the same site -- must be stopped. This scheme is also outrageous and very high-risk, as is Holtec's and the U.S. Department of Energy's scheme to ship highly radioactive wastes from Palisades to the Port of Muskegon on the surface waters of Lake Michigan.
It is now time to safeguard and secure the high-level radioactive waste stored on-site, to clean up the widespread hazardous radioactive contamination of the property before it further threatens Lake Michigan and adjacent groundwater aquifers, and to carry out a just transition for the workforce and host region, into the long overdue clean, safe, and affordable renewable and efficient energy system of the future.
Last but not least, Congress should demand the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission require Palisades' age-degraded safety-significant systems, structures, and components -- particularly its badly embrittled reactor pressure vessel -- be comprehensively examined, and lessons learned be applied at still operating reactors, such as the Point Beach nuclear power plant on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shore, Unit 2 of which is now the worst embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the country, if Palisades has in fact closed for good, as it should."
Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic.
(301) 270-2209"As long as non-human primates are used in scientific experiments, we are morally obligated to provide them with sufficient social conditions that ensure their emotional wellbeing," one researcher argued.
Hundreds of scientists, doctors, and academics from around the world—including renowned primatologist Jane Goodall—on Wednesday urged the U.S. National Institutes of Health to review and ultimately end funding for "cruel experiments" on non-human primates at Harvard University.
In a letter led by Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Clinic and the Wild Minds Lab at the University of St. Andrews School of Psychology and Neuroscience in the United Kingdom, 380 signatories urge senior National Institutes of Health officials to "review the protocols and justifications" related to the "funding of unethical experiments on macaque monkeys and other non-human primates taking place at Harvard Medical School."
\u201cBreaking: More than 380 scientists, including Jane Goodall, Ian Redmond and Richard Wrangham, join the Animal Law & Policy Clinic @Harvard_Law and the Wild Minds Lab @univofstandrews in calling on @NIH to stop funding cruel monkey experiments @harvardmed.\n\nhttps://t.co/i89Y1aA4ki\u201d— Harvard Animal Law (@Harvard Animal Law) 1675873266
As the letter details:
An NIH-funded Harvard Medical School lab run by neurobiologist Dr. Margaret S. Livingstone has used infant macaque monkeys to study visual recognition by depriving them of the ability to see faces, either by sewing their eyes shut or by requiring staff to wear welders’ masks around them. In some cases, the lab implants electrode arrays into the monkeys' brains.
By design, these experiments require maternal deprivation—a fact that drew the ire of scientists last fall, when Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an Inaugural Article by Dr. Livingstone entitled Triggers for Mother Love. The article describes the lab's practice of taking infant macaques from their mothers shortly after birth and attempting to appease the mothers' distress by giving them plush toys as "surrogate infants."
"As a primatologist with decades of experience in the field, I can say with complete confidence that we know that infant primates and their mothers suffer greatly when they are separated. We also know that depriving infants of the ability to see faces will have adverse impacts on their brain and eye development," Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist and primatologist at Harvard, said in a statement.
"Taking infant monkeys from their mothers to use in invasive brain experiments could only be justified by expectations of extraordinarily important benefits for the monkeys themselves, or for humans," he added. "Because that high ethical bar has not been met, I see no legitimate need for any such research."
"These studies fail on both scientific and ethical grounds."
Catherine Hobaiter, the principal investigator at Wild Minds Lab, asserted that "these studies fail on both scientific and ethical grounds."
"The doublethink argument that maternally separated individuals represent appropriate models for conditions such as anxiety, while arguing these methods do not cause significant distress, is fundamentally flawed," she said. "Our fundamental role as scientists is to update, refine, and redefine our understanding of the world around us. Doing so must include not only our theoretical positions, but our ethical responsibility to the animals we have given no choice in becoming our subjects of study."
Gal Badihi, a graduate research student at Wild Minds Lab, argued that "as long as non-human primates are used in scientific experiments, we are morally obligated to provide them with sufficient social conditions that ensure their emotional wellbeing."
"This is not only an ethical requirement," Badihi added, "but essential for research validity and integrity."
"The energy sector should be looking to the future of justly sourced renewable energy, not pushing outdated technology that exploits people and the planet."
More than a dozen groups intervened in a case in Wyoming on Wednesday to defend the Biden administration's decision to postpone the sale of oil and gas leases in the state, arguing that numerous court ruling and settled laws have affirmed the U.S. Interior Department is free to determine when such sales will go forward—or whether they will at all.
The legal groups Earthjustice and the Western Environmental Law Center are representing 17 national and local groups in the case, in which the state of Wyoming and two industry trade groups sued the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in December over its postponement of sales that had been planned for 2021 and 2022.
The BLM currently has several sales scheduled for 2023, covering nearly half a million acres, but as Friends of the Earth (FOE) said in a press statement Wednesday, the groups "want the court to order the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the BLM to hold lease sales every three months across the West"—despite warnings from energy experts and scientists that fossil fuel extraction must be phased out in order to avoid the worst effects of the climate emergency.
"Today's filing demonstrates that we refuse to sit back and allow Big Oil to push for policies that perpetuate dirty energy," said Hallie Templeton, legal director for FOE. "The law is crystal clear: the federal government holds broad authority over whether, when, and how to lease public lands for oil and gas development. The energy sector should be looking to the future of justly sourced renewable energy, not pushing outdated technology that exploits people and the planet."
FOE is joined by groups including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Citizens for a Health Community, and the Western Organization of Resource Councils in defending the Biden administration's decision.
A U.S. District Court ruling in Wyoming in September 2022 affirmed that the administration can postpone the sales, and the U.S. Supreme Court has also ruled that the agencies "have broad discretion to determine the timing and scope of lease sales, including not holding them at all," FOE said in the press statement.
\u201cNEWS RELEASE: Conservation groups to defend @POTUS administration postponement of oil, gas lease sales. Again.\n\nWe won this case last year, too.\n\nhttps://t.co/pN5NO55VgM @Earthjustice @Wilderness @foe_us @CenterForBioDiv @MTEIC @PRBResCouncil @NPCA @WildernessWork @SierraClub\u201d— Western Environmental Law Center (@Western Environmental Law Center) 1675882076
Bob LeResche, a Powder River Basin Resource Council board member and chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils, noted that the industry has already "stockpiled" more than 9,000 approved federal drilling permits.
"Forcing Interior to lease without fully weighing public impacts is industry’s attempt to continue looting public resources by accumulating excess leases at bargain basement prices," said LeResche. "The industry could continue drilling and producing as normal for decades even with no new leases."
The postponement represents a correction of BLM's longtime practice of "blindly" leasing public lands for oil and gas drilling "without actually understanding the impacts of development," said Peter Hart, an attorney with Wilderness Workshop.
"Now the agency is working to reevaluate its oil and gas management and to assess impacts, like those that new development will have on the climate," he added. "It just makes sense to pause new leasing until the program is brought into this century, and it is well within the agency’s authority."
In response to organizing efforts, "the $122 billion-dollar corporation has fought their workers every step of the way, including refusing to bargain a first contract in good faith, delay tactics, and a significant escalation in union-busting."
Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Tuesday invited Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to testify about the coffee giant's "lack of compliance with federal labor laws."
All 10 Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) joined Sanders, who chairs the panel, in inviting Schultz to a hearing scheduled for March 9.
The letter—signed by Sanders and Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bob Casey (D-Pa.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), Tina Smith (D-Minn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—gives Schultz until February 14 to confirm his attendance at the hearing.
"We greatly appreciate your assistance to the HELP Committee," the lawmakers told Schultz, whose wealth increased by $800 million during the pandemic to nearly $4 billion.
\u201cToday, I joined with my Democratic colleagues on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to invite Starbucks CEO @HowardSchultz to testify at a hearing on his company's labor practices.\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1675884960
Since December 2021, when baristas in Buffalo made history by forming the first unionized Starbucks in the United States, workers at nearly 280 of the coffee chain's locations nationwide have voted to unionize. Organizers have won more than 80% of their campaigns despite the company's unlawful intimidation and retaliation tactics.
In response to mounting demands for better wages, benefits, and conditions, "the $122 billion-dollar corporation has fought their workers every step of the way, including refusing to bargain a first contract in good faith, delay tactics, and a significant escalation in union-busting," Sanders' office noted in a statement.
"There have been 500 unfair labor practice cases filed against Starbucks and its affiliates," the statement continued. "The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued 75 complaints in response to those charges and has sought emergency preliminary injunctive relief in five cases in the federal courts."
"Sanders has sent three letters to Schultz in the last year calling on the CEO to end the egregious union-busting campaign the company has deployed against its own workers," the Vermont Independent's office added. "Schultz has not yet responded to or provided the documents requested in the most recent letter Sanders sent in January 2023."