Anti-nuclear watchdogs have long called for the shutdown of Palisades. Here, Don't Waste MI board members Michael Keegan, Alice Hirt, and Kevin Kamps speak out at the year 2000 Great Lakes Nuclear-Free Action Camp. Palisades' steam, as well as Lake Michigan, are visible in the background. In the foreground, crosses bearing the names of counties, cities, towns, and villages that would comprise the Dead Zone downwind of a catastrophic radioactivity release from Palisades, are planted into the beach sand.On March 9, 2012, board members representing various chapters of the statewide anti-nuclear watchdog coalition Don't Waste Michigan delivered a letter to U.S. Senators Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow (both Democrats form Michigan) pleading with them to take action to address the very serious risks associated with the Palisades atomic reactor's worst embrittled pressure vessel in the U.S., dangerously vulnerable to a "Pressurized Thermal Shock" (PTS) Loss of Coolant Accident (LOCA). The Emergency Core Cooling System at Palisades came precariously close to injecting cooling water into the hellishly hot reactor core on Sept. 25, 2011 during a chaotic incident of "substantial significance to safety," according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. If the ECCS had injected coolant into the badly embrittled reactor pressure vessel, it could have fractured it like a hot glass under cold water, testing NRC's repeated weakenings of PTS safety regulations in the real world.
Attached to Don't Waste Michigan's letter were a number of enclosures, including: Detroit Free Press articles, dated Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012; a Detroit Free Press editorial, same date; the Jan. 17, 2007 environmental coalition intervenors’ response to finalization of NRC rubberstamp of Palisades’ 20 year license extension; the first article in an Associated Press four part series, dated June 2011, entitled “Aging Nukes” -- this kick-off article is entitled “Nuke regulators weaken safety rules” (embrittlement regulatory weakening a featured case in point); a Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes 1993 backgrounder on embrittlement/PTS risks at Palisades (18 years earlier than AP article above), documenting that Palisades first violated NRC PTS regulations in 1981, just ten years into operations; an NRC Office of Inspector General Audit Report, dated Sept. 2007, on reactor license extensions, documenting that NRC staff “cut and paste” nuclear utility documentation, yet presented it as independent NRC safety, environmental, and audit work (aka plagiarism, in the company’s profit interest, but against the public interest in health, safety and environmental protection); an NRC OIG follow-up report, dated May 2008, documenting that NRC staff destroys its primary working documents once license extensions are rubberstamped; a large environmental coalition's March 20, 2006 letters to Senators Levin and Stabenow, requesting a GAO investigation on embrittlement/PTS risks at Palisades, and in fact nationwide, given NRC regulatory rollbacks (those letters were not even acknowledged, let alone acted upon).