Coalition defends its intervention against Fermi 2 license extension

NRC file photo of Fermi 2Beyond Nuclear, Citizens Environment Alliance of Southwestern Ontario, and Don't Waste Michigan, in coalition opposing Detroit Edison's application for a 20-year license extension at Fermi 2 on the Lake Erie shore in southeast MI (photo, left), have defended their intervention. Their Toledo-based attorney, Terry Lodge, filed the coalition's reply to objections filed a week earlier by DTE and NRC staff. The coalition's petition for leave to intervene and request for a hearing was filed by the Aug. 18th deadline.

Detroit Edison hopes to extend Fermi 2's operating license from 2025 till 2045.

Fermi 2 is the largest General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor in the world. At 1,122 Megawatts-electric, it is nearly as big in size as Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 and 2's Mark I reactors put together.

The coalition's contentions concern the Mark I's fatally flawed containment, and no plans to upgrade it by adding radioactivity filters to hardened vents; the risk of a high-level radioactive waste storage pool fire releasing a catastrophic amount of hazardous radioactivity; and the risk of common mode failures of safety and cooling systems, stemming from the age-degraded Fermi 2, and the proposed new, untested Fermi 3 GE-Hitachi so-called "Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor" (ESBWR), both sharing the same transmission line corridor for importing off-site electricity.