By Kevin Kamps and Alice Hirt

The Kalamazoo Gazette
Sunday, September 18, 2005

The owner (Consumers Energy) and operator (Nuclear Management Co. LLC of Hudson, Wis.) of the Palisades nuclear reactor on the Lake Michigan shoreline near South Haven have applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a 20-year extension to the original 40-year operating license. But a growing coalition, including the Michigan Environmental Council which represents 70 grassroots groups across the state comprising 200,000 members, stands in opposition.

For safety's sake, it's high time to pull the plug on Palisades.

Operating the 38-year-old reactor for two more decades risks rupture of the highly-deteriorated reactor vessel and catastrophic radiation release into the surrounding environment.

Palisades has, perhaps, the most embrittled reactor vessel in the United States. Neutron radiation from the nuclear chain reaction has seriously decreased the vessel's ductility, or flexibility. If, during emergencies, cooling water is pumped into the thermally hot and highly pressurized core, the pressurized thermal shock could rupture the brittle reactor vessel like a hot glass under cold water.

The nuclear fuel could then no longer be cooled or controlled. It could literally melt through the foundations of the plant into the groundwater below. Catastrophic amounts of deadly radioactivity would be released into Lake Michigan which is a source of drinking water (and so much more) to tens of millions of people. As happened at Chernobyl, cancer-causing airborne radioactivity would blow with the wind to communities, such as Kalamazoo, dozens and hundreds of miles away.

A 1982 NRC report predicted that a meltdown and large-scale radiation release from Palisades would cause 1,000 fatalities and 7,000 injuries in just the first year, 10,000 cancer deaths over time, and more than $50 billion in property damage. These figures, adjusted for inflation and population growth since then, would be even worse now. But Chernobyl, which cost $350 billion in just the first decade, shows how bad damage from a full-scale nuclear catastrophe can be.

Tellingly, Nuclear Management Co. is a limited liability corporation, meaning it would largely or entirely avoid paying for damages resulting from its mistakes at Palisades, even catastrophic ones. And Consumers Energy would be shielded by the federal Price-Anderson Act, a subsidy unique to the nuclear power industry. Under Price-Anderson, if victims are compensated at all, it would be U.S. taxpayers, not Consumers Energy, paying the lion's share of damages. If Palisades is so safe, why don't Consumers and Nuclear Management Co. give up these liability protections?

Homeowners and car insurance companies know how risky nuclear power is -- they refuse to insure against accidents. Just check your policy.

As the Kalamazoo Gazette mentioned in its Aug. 16 editorial, Palisades also has a serious waste problem. But little known is that the pad under the outdoor silos containing high-level radioactive wastes just 150 yards from the waters of Lake Michigan is in violation of NRC earthquake regulations. A quake could send wastes into the Lake.

Palisades has no safe place to store the wastes that it continues to generate. Yucca Mountain is no solution to the nuclear waste crisis, but rather a fatally flawed illusion. U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, was right when she voted against this dangerous boondoggle in 2002, citing as her main objection the U.S. Department of Energy's risky proposal to barge 70 casks of high-level radioactive waste up the Lake Michigan shoreline from Palisades to the Port of Muskegon as part of its Yucca plan.

But even if Yucca does open someday, it has a legal limit to how much waste it could accept. There will be enough waste in the United States by 2010 to fill Yucca, long before it ever opens. This means that even if the 585 tons of deadly high-level radioactive waste generated at Palisades from 1971 to 2011 gets buried at Yucca, the nearly 300 tons that would be generated from 2011 to 2031 during the extended license would be stuck on the Lake Michigan shoreline, with nowhere to go.

Shutting Palisades in 2011, the current operating license expiration date, would prevent the generation of that excess waste. Not making it in the first place is the only solution we have for the vexing problem of high-level radioactive waste.

Kevin Kamps, born and raised in Kalamazoo, graduated as a valedictorian from Loy Norrix High School and studied chemistry at Kalamazoo College. He watch-dogged Palisades as a volunteer from 1993 to 1999 while also directing the Chernobyl Children's Project. Since 1999, he has served as nuclear waste specialist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service in Washington, D.C.

Alice Hirt resides in Holland. She is a member of West Michigan Environmental Action Council, and a board member of the statewide organization, Don't Waste Michigan, which stopped eight Midwestern states' radioactive wastes from being dumped in Michigan. Both groups have applied to the NRC to officially intervene against the 20-year license extension at Palisades.