Tell the NRC: No Permit to Pollute!

Hello community!

We hope you all had a safe and healthy Halloween over the weekend. Fall colors are still radiant and beautiful here in Southeastern Michigan, but we feel the edge of winter creeping in. With every winter comes more concerns about DTE’s lackluster infrastructure to support the community through the freezing temperatures and snowstorms here in the Midwest.

There’s some important news coming in from the desk of Grandmother Jessie Collins about Fermi 2 this month, as well as from CRAFT ally Terry Lodge regarding the Palisades nuclear power plant. Read on for how you can support the fight against both of these nuclear disasters!

Tell the NRC
No Permit to Pollute!
by November 4th!

The US federal government is trying for the sixteenth time to pretend nuclear waste is not radioactive. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), through the NRC 2025-1568 Exemptions from Licensing rule, is trying to quietly exempt hundreds of radionuclides from oversight, to be released into trash and consumer products. But this move is controversial, which would allow them to be released into trash. The public has already decided that they do not want this. Seventeen states have laws curtailing this kind of deregulation. Even NRC responded to public pressure and declared a moratorium on the implementation of a similar policy in 1991. At that time, it was known as Below Regulatory Concern (BRC). Review the issue and the talking points.

Send your comments to NRC. Tell them to withdraw this rule.

No Permit to Pollute!

Chemical Waste Accident in Ohio

At least two Michigan school districts near the Ohio border closed October 21st amid a shelter-in-place order in Toledo, where a chemical tank rupture caused a potentially toxic leak. A white plume billowed into the air and forced evacuations due to the potentially toxic leak and the possibility of an explosion. More than 50,000 people were advised to stay indoors as a precaution within a 3-mile radius that included neighborhoods along the Lake Erie shoreline and stretched just across the state line into Michigan.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency said without elaborating that the leak happened because of an error while the material was being transferred.

an error while the material
was being transferred

Meanwhile, organizations across the continent are fighting against the transportation of nuclear waste, including here in Michigan where the state of New York was trying to displace the waste from the infamous Manhattan Project. If an error like this can endanger 50,000 people, what can an error when transporting nuclear waste do to our communities and to our environment?

Public Perils at Palisades

An Open Letter to the NRC

We’re sharing with you a letter from Terry J. Lodge, Esq., the Counsel for Don’t Waste Michigan and Michigan Safe Energy Future, addressed to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regarding the Palisades Nuclear Plant (dubbed the Zombie Reactor), operated by Holtec International.

Back in August, workers began reloading fuel rods into the Palisade reactor’s core when a fuel assembly was damaged when it tipped over. The highly irradiated fuel is in a very precarious position tipped and tilted at a 30-degree angle, wedged between the reactor floor and reactor shroud.

Holtec applied for an emergency amendment to use a new procedure to remove the damaged assembly. In his response to Holtec’s rush to the NRC, Lodge writes:

This is not a bona fide emergency. Holtec’s economic “emergency” is not a public emergency. Holtec’s desire to avoid public embarrassment at being forced to reveal the actual details of how the fuel bundle problem occurred in the first place is also not an emergency. Holtec persists in its ongoing and unjustified race to accomplish the restart wherein Holtec, itself, has been the source of its problems.

How many more “one-time” exemptions and excursions will the public have to anxiously tolerate as Holtec shambles along its improvidently accelerated path to a gilded restart? How much more common sense and solid science will Holtec be permitted to ignore as it serially bets the public health and the natural environment of Michigan on its quest to enrich absentee investors?