"Groups warned of deterioration at Palisades nuke plant"

Michael Keegan, Alice Hirt, and Kevin Kamps call for Palisades' shut down at the Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Action Camp in August 2000; Palisades' cooling tower rises in the background.Eartha Jane Melzer at the Michigan Messenger has reported that Michigan's anti-nuclear watchdogs warned about embrittlement of the Palisades atomic reactor pressure vessel as early as 1993, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission merely weakened its safety regulations to accomodate the age-degraded facility. The Associated Press ran a four-part exposé on this scandalous pattern of behavior last week. At Palisades, NRC's complicity has included steamrolling of the public by the Atomic Safety (sic) and Licensing Board, and rubberstamping of a 20 year license extension for perhaps the most embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S., located on the Lake Michigan shoreline. In addition, NRC has ignored earthquake safety regulations at Palisades vis a vis its dry cask storage of high-level radioactive waste just 100 yards from the drinking water supply for 40 million people downstream, despite two decades of repeated warnings by its own Midwest region dry cask storage inspector. Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) has posted an online chronology of resistance to Palisades' 20 year license extension, as well as the 1990s documents warning about earthquake and other risks at Palisades' dry cask storage facility.