As a courtesy to our safe-energy colleagues in Michigan, we forward the accompanying press release, which describes the radioactive contamination of workers at the aged and currently shuttered Palisades nuclear reactor, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.
The reactor’s current owner — HOLTEC International — is on the fast track to reopen the long-shuttered, historically problematic reactor, and in addition intends to site a number of so-called “small modular nuclear reactors” on the same site.
Safe-energy activists have intervened in opposition to this re-start — something never done before in the U.S. — by a company with zero previous experience in operating a nuclear reactor site, and now currently is demonstrating its priority for opening schedules over the safety of its workers.
HOLTEC’s demonstrated indifference to worker safety, coupled with the Trump Administration’s wrecking-ball approach to nuclear power (de-)regulation), places the drinking water supply of 16 million people in jeopardy.
With nearly 2000 GIGA-watts of power projects (most of which are renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy storage projects) awaiting grid connection according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Palisades’ 805 MEGA-watts of electric power is relatively insignificant. It seems that HOLTEC is more interested in profiting from the subsidy harvesting from the U.S. Department of Energy and the State of Michigan than in providing safe, impactful electric power to Michigan.
For more information, contact the individuals listed in the press release.
For Immediate Release, September 4, 2026
Palisades Cited for Not Protecting Workers from Radiation Exposure
Poor Quality Assurance / Worker Fatigue / Worker Exposure
Contacts: Michael J. Keegan, Don’t Waste Michigan, Monroe, MI, [email protected], (734) 770-1441
Kevin Kamps, Don’t Waste Michigan, Kalamazoo, MI, [email protected], (269) 217-6326(Interviews with the environmental coalition’s expert witness, nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen, or legal counsel Terry Lodge and Wally Taylor, can be arranged through Keegan or Kamps above.)COVERT TWP., MICHIGAN, and ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND – On September 2nd, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC, headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.) posted to ADAMS (its Agency-wide Document Access and Management System) NRC Inspection Report 05000255/2026090 <https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML26245A104.pdf>, which reported that the NRC has identified two Violations for which Holtec Palisades will not be cited. (The Palisades atomic reactor is located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Covert Township, Van Buren County, southwest Michigan.) The NRC found that there was failure to implement the radiation protection program for work activities with high alpha contamination levels, failure to Monitor Internal Dose Cornerstone Significance Cross-Cutting Area, and that the licensee failed to assess internal dose for various individuals in elevated airborne areas.
ML26245A104 Palisades Nuclear Plant – NRC Inspection Report 05000255/2026090 2026-09-02 02:40 PM EST 2026-08-31 295.29 KB Ed Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, posted:Ed Lyman @nucsafetyucs.bsky.social posted: “Holtec is boasting about loading fuel into the Palisades #nuclear reactor in #Michigan, yet it just received 2 violations for failing to protect its workers from high airborne radiation levels. And we are supposed to trust them to keep the public safe…”.Airborne contamination by radioactive isotopes that emit alpha particles is a serious health risk to exposed workers. Inhalation of even a microscopic amount of an alpha emitter, such as plutonium isotopes as but one example, can initiate lung cancer. Although the latency period before lung cancer manifestation may be many years or even decades long, the “time bomb” began “ticking” when the alpha contamination was inhaled into the workers’ lungs.“The NRC recently granted the fifth exemption to Holtec at Palisades to exceed worker fatigue requirements and work long extended hours to meet the workload. This coupled with notorious poor Quality Assurance and missing documentation has now led to worker contamination,” stated Michael J. Keegan with Don’t Waste Michigan.There have been five exemptions on Worker Fatigue to date.
ML26156A017
ML26156A018
ML26156A019ML2119/ML21195A368.html Parent zip of 3 below)
- ML21195A367 – Exemption-Palisades Nuclear Plant (PNP) Record Retention-L-2021-LLE-0033 (13 page(s), 11/23/2021)
- ML21195A369 – FRN – PNP Records Retention Exemption FRN- L-2021-LLE-0033 (16 page(s), 11/23/2021)
- ML21195A372 – Palisades Nuclear Plant – Partial Exemption From Record Retention Requirements (EPID L-2021-LLE-0033) (16 page(s), 11/23/2021)
- Palisades Simulator Inspection Report – Violation Missing QA
- https://adamswebsearch2.nrc.
gov/webSearch2/main.jsp? AccessionNumber=ML24078A31 Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with 55 years of relevant experience, who has served as an expert witness for opponents of Palisades’ continued operations for a dozen years, added that “radiation levels will be a million times higher in a few months,” after Palisades restarts.Holtec is loading nuclear fuel into the reactor core for the first time since Entergy irreversibly closed Palisades for good, on June 13, 2022. Or so it was thought. Holtec took ownership of Palisades on June 28, 2022, supposedly for decommissioning purposes only (dismantling of infrastructure, clean up of radioactive contamination, and management of radioactive waste). But just a week later, Holtec secretly applied to the U.S. Department of Energy and State of Michigan for many billions of dollars of taxpayer and ratepayer funding to restart the closed reactor, and build new ones, instead. (See: https://beyondnuclear.org/5775-2/ ). Kevin Kamps, executive director of Don’t Waste Michigan, from Kalamazoo, 35 miles downwind of Palisades, stated: “The radiation overexposure of workers at Palisades is a final warning about the very high risk of hazardous radiation overexposure of area residents, if Holtec restarts Palisades. The zombie reactor restart is unprecedented, unneeded, insanely expensive for the public, and very high risk for health, safety, security, and the environment. The degraded steam generator tubes at Palisades are but one example. Holtec’s own contractor, Framatome of France, has admitted that there will be exponentially increasing risk of a tube burst at Palisades just 14 months after restart. A single tube burst will emit hazardous radioactivity into the environment. But if enough tubes burst all at once, in a cascading failure, a reactor core meltdown would result, with Chornobyl- or Fukushima-like impacts downwind, downstream, up the food chain, and down the generations.”Don’t Waste Michigan and Michigan Safe Energy Future are pursuing federal court appeals, in both the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, in opposition to the Palisades restart. Terry Lodge in Toledo, Ohio, and Wally Taylor in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, serve as the environmental coalition’s legal counsel.A chronicle of web posts documenting 4.5 years of grassroots environmental resistance to the 60-year old (designed in the mid-1960s, ground broken on construction in 1967, and fire up of the reactor in 1971) reactor’s restart, and the proposed “Small Modular Reactor” (SMR) new builds at Palisades, is posted at: https://beyondnuclear.org/newest-nuke-nightmares-at- palisades-2022-present/. It begins in April 2022, the month that Holtec founder and CEO, Krishna Singh, first floated “SMR” new builds, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated the zombie reactor restart, instead of the long promised permanent shutdown and decommissioning. — End —
