Opponents to Protest Holtec's Unprecedented Palisades "Zombie" Atomic Reactor Restart with Halloween Street Theater of the Absurd: Recent Incidents at Lake Michigan Shore Nuclear Plant Reveal Lack of Quality Assurance, a Red Flag for Potentially Monstrous

 NEWS FROM BEYOND NUCLEAR

 
  For immediate release 

  Contact: Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist, Beyond Nuclear, Kalamazoo, Michigan, (240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org

  Michael J. Keegan, chair, Don't Waste Michigan, Monroe, Michigan, mkeeganj@comcast.net 

Opponents to Protest Holtec's Unprecedented Palisades "Zombie" Atomic Reactor Restart 

with Halloween Street Theater of the Absurd

Recent Incidents at Lake Michigan Shore Nuclear Plant Reveal Lack of Quality Assurance, 

a Red Flag for Potentially Monstrous Risks to Come

COVERT TOWNSHIP, MICHIGAN and WASHINGTON, D.C., October 28, 2025--

"Zombies Against Palisades!" (ZAP!), a Halloween-themed protest against the nuclear nightmares unfolding at Holtec's Lake Michigan shoreline nuclear power plant in southwest Michigan, will be held on Friday, October 31, 2025 at U.S. Representative Huizenga's office in Portage, Michigan. (U.S. Rep. Huizenga has been a staunch supporter of Holtec's unprecedented, and absurdly dangerous, reactor restart scheme, and the $1.52 billion, and still counting, in federal taxpayer bailouts paying for it.) Traverse City-based Great Lakes singer/songwriter Victor McManemy, and the Fennville, Michigan-based Great Lakes Brass Band, will perform at the protest rallies from noon to 1:30pm ET, and 4:30 to 6pm ET.

Holtec's extremely high-risk "zombie" reactor restart is now being overseen by a zombified safety regulator. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) safety regulation, never robust, has been in absolute free fall. Now the federal government shutdown means even less NRC oversight and enforcement, as Holtec races at breakneck speed to restart the 60-year old (designed in the mid-1960s), severely age-degraded atomic reactor. Holtec's dangerous rush seems to be driven by its Initial Public Offering, announced for early 2026, where it hopes to raise $10 billion. (Holtec has long maintained it would restart Palisades by the end of 2025 at the latest, but Bloomberg has just reported the reactor will not resume operations until early next year.) 

The consequences of Holtec's race to the cliff edge, and NRC's dangerously diminished regulatory oversight, have become quite clearly evident, made manifest by major management failures. A Holtec Palisades worker falling into the flooded reactor cavity during refueling operations on October 21, 2025 garnered widespread media coverage. However, additional recent incidents at Palisades have yet to receive much, if any, media coverage whatsoever. These include a leak of toxic chemicals into Lake Michigan, as well as empty alcohol bottles found in Palisades' critical reactor-related "protected area." The glaring lack of oversight and poor Quality Assurance raise red flags for potentially worse risks to come once Holtec actually restarts Palisades.

A U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) incident report dated October 22, 2025 stated: "On October 22, 2025, at 0452 EDT, chemistry determined that a report to the State of Michigan, Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, would be required based on exceeding the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit limit for hydrazine. This exceedance did not exceed any NRC regulations or reporting criteria...There was no impact on the health and safety of the public or plant personnel. (Emphasis added)

The incident report's wording is peculiar and misleading. The exceedance did exceed National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) limits for hydrazine discharges into Lake Michigan, as the NRC incident report itself also stated, violating State of Michigan regulations, and requiring a notification to relevant state agencies.

Hydrazine is an ultra-toxic, cancer-causing chemical. Despite 71 environmental organizations officially objecting to Holtec's renewal of Palisades' NPDES permit by the October, 2024 public comment deadline -- with a particular concern about the large amounts of hydrazine discharge that would be allowed into Lake Michigan -- MI EGLE (the State of Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy) rubber stamped the NPDES permit anyway on June 27, 2025. This is yet another act -- which has included $300 million in state taxpayer bailout funding pocketed by Holtec -- by the state government enabling Holtec's unprecedented Palisades restart scheme.

"Holtec and the State of Michigan seem to regard the Great Lakes as a radioactive wastewater and toxic chemical industrial sewer, rather than the sacred source of drinking water, and so much more, for more than 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a very large number of Indigenous Nations," said Kevin Kamps, Kalamazoo, Michigan-based radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear. "As Indigenous Water Protectors from the Dakotas to the Great Lakes proclaim, 'Water Is Life.' Holtec's Palisades restart is an existential threat to 21% of the entire planet's vital surface fresh water supply," Kamps added.

Beyond Nuclear's board of directors president emerita, Kay Drey in St. Louis, Missouri, published a pamphlet about the harm to human health caused by intentional, permitted "routine releases" of hazardous radioactivity and toxic chemicals, even during "normal operations" at nuclear power plants. (The pamphlet includes a photo of Palisades' wastewater discharge pathway.) Unintentional leaks and spills make matters worse.

"As Dr. Rosalie Bertell of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health warned decades ago in her book No Immediate Danger?: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth, it's irresonsible and misleading for the incident report to claim that '[t]here was no impact on the health and safety of the public.' What about the latency period for hydrazine-caused cancer? What about the future negative health consequences for area residents who ingest carcinogenic hydrazine in their drinking water, or the fish they eat?" asked Kamps.

Yet another NRC incident report dated October 26, 2025 stated: FITNESS FOR DUTY (FFD) EVENT..."On 10/25/25, at approximately 1230 EDT, 3 empty alcohol bottles were found in the protected area by a contract employee. Site security was notified and took possession of the empty bottles which were removed from the protected area. The individual who accidentally brought in the empty alcohol bottles with other non-alcoholic empty bottles was tested for FFD and was negative... (Emphasis added)

"This Fitness for Duty incident report is confusing, begging more questions than it answers. Regarding the individual who brought the three empty alcohol bottles into the protected area, what are their safety responsibilities? How and why did the individual 'accidentally' bring empty alcohol bottles, and other non-alcohol empty bottles, into the protected area? Where and by whom was the alcohol consumed? Was it consumed by others in the protected area, who were then not tested for Fitness for Duty? As Holtec races to restart Palisades, is there a substance abuse problem amongst its workers in charge of vital safety jobs?" Kamps asked.

"These most recent Event Reports have an underlying root cause of poor Quality Assurance and a lack of oversight by Holtec at Palisades. The poor Quality Assurance at Palisades is endemic and baked in, soon to be pronounced as equipment fails. Holtec has placed production over safety with a multitude of requests for relief as they gallop to calamity," stated Michael J. Keegan, researcher with Don't Waste Michigan.

"A wide variety of incident reports have been issued about the Palisades atomic reactor since construction began in 1967, and since operations began in 1971, until Entergy made the wise decision to close it for good on May 20, 2022, due to yet another reported incident -- the latest in 50 years of safety-crtiical control rod drive mechansim seal leaks, yet another potential pathway to reactor core meltdown. Palisades has long been nicknamed 'The Monster on the Beach' by some of its nearest neighbors. These major management failures by Holtec and NRC beg the question, does Dr. Frankenstein even know what mischief his monster is getting into?" Kamps asked.

"Perhaps most monstrously, the move by NRC's Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards to strike the Palisades steam generator discussion from the agenda of its last major meeting before the restart decision deprives the public of open scientific and engineering discussion to ensure there is no major radiological accident at Palisades. Credible nuclear engineers, including our expert witness Arnie Gundersen, have warned that there are high odds of a disaster which would be worsened by the lack of working, proven emergency arrangements. The hallmark of a Zombie Palisades restart is this sense of a relentless lurching forward where the corporation and the NRC pointedly ignore authoritative warnings of a real-time horror show," said Terry Lodge, Toledo, Ohio-based attorney for the environmental coalition opposing the reactor restart. 

A one-stop-shop of Beyond Nuclear web posts about Palisades, arranged chronologically backwards from the present to April 2022, can be found here. That was the month Holtec's CEO Krishna Singh first floated "Small Modular Reactor" construction at Palisades, and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer first floated the zombie reactor restart scheme, breaking the promise to decommission Palisades instead.