With all the talk about solar and windmill energy and how they will power our country in the future, we hear very little about nuclear plants that are being recommissioned.
Nuclear power is considered by many to be the most efficient, and cleanest form of energy. In the early 2000’s however, after the catastrophic Three Mile Island incident, and Chernobyl earlier, and the Japanese nuclear power plant meltdown in 2011, nuclear was considered unsafe.
However, that mindset has changed among experts and recommissioning even Three Mile Island is expected to happen. Right here in our backyard the first recommissioned nuclear facility is preparing for an October re-opening.
Palisades in Covert (Van Buren County) now owned by Holtec Inc, has nearly 600 employees and another 400 contractors onsite preparing the nuclear power plant for action. Holtec purchased Palisades in 2022 and originally was set to dismantle the plant, but after receiving a $1.52 billion loan from the Biden administration, is now doing the opposite.
Holtec will also receive an additional $150 million from the State of Michigan. Governor Whitmer in package of bills signed by her in November 2023 created a goal for Michigan to reach 100% carbon neutrality standards by 2040, a plan that moved up the deadline from 2050. Kara Cook, Michigan’s chief climate and energy strategist, said nuclear power is an important piece of the puzzle in reaching that goal.
“Nuclear is a really important component of us being able to meet that 100% clean energy standard by 2040,” Cook said. “It’s not going to be the only component, right? We need a diverse portfolio of clean energy resources in Michigan to make sure that we’re balancing the clean energy goals along with reliability and affordability.”
The plant will generate 800 megawatts of baseload power, all carbon free, enough to meet the electricity needs of roughly 800,000 homes, and create over 1,000 new jobs during refueling and maintenance. The plant’s advanced age means it will require extensive upgrades to meet modern safety standards. Those upgrades are being instituted as we speak.
Midwestern power companies, Michigan-based Wolverine and Indiana-based Hoosier Energy, agreed to purchase all of the generated energy from Holtec. In September, Wolverine received a federal grant to receive 435 megawatts of energy from Palisades. I’m curious as to why Consumers Energy isn’t involved.
I’m not sure this area has seen a bigger project in the last ten years. One-thousand new jobs is terrific for a stifled economy, and to imagine this plant can service almost a million homes is breathtaking.
Expect this to be a model for other long forgotten, decommissioned nuclear power plants. Nuclear is the best source of clean energy for the U.S. Sure wind turbines and acres of solar panels can provide energy as well, but not to the extent of nuclear power plants.
I sincerely hope Palisades meets its October start-up and is wildly successful. It will go along way towards helping the U.S. meet its increased energy needs. Just as important it will provide a thousand new jobs to our area economy.
Bjørn Lomborg discusses nuclear energy:
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet (2020)
In False Alarm, Lomborg presents a clear, data-driven critique of current climate policies and emphasizes nuclear energy as a realistic and underused solution. He argues that if the world is serious about cutting emissions, it must stop vilifying nuclear power and start investing in next-generation technologies.
• He critiques the closure of existing nuclear plants.
• He addresses public fears vs. the actual safety record.
• He makes a case for global-scale investment in nuclear innovation.
Mike’s been snoozing. While asleep he missed some important facts. Nuclear power is not efficient, nor is it clean. (That it has been defined as “clean” by the Ohio legislature doesn’t make it so.)
It’s inefficiency is revealed by the amount of heat it adds to the air and water: about two times as much as fossil fuel generation per killowatt-hour; to say nothing of the huge outlay for construction, fuel and the spent-fuel storage “cost-beyond-fathoming” that we are passing to our progeny.
And people who benefit from nuclear power keep calling it “clean”. They must not know it’s a sin to tell a lie. Ask the uranium miners from New Mexico, Canada and Africa, who brought radiation home to their wives and children. What causes their illlnesses and death? It’s radioactive isotopes in the water that drips from the underground veins of uranium, the air they breath in the mines and the contamination that sticks to their clothes.
But it’s not clean for us users either. Nuclear power plants (NPPs) routinely emit short-lived isotopes that are even more damaging into OUR air and water. Joe Mangano demonstrates elevated cancer death (the crudest measure of radiation’s effect, but one that can be accessed in public documents) among people raised near nuclear power plants. Mr Mangano also has been tracking the amount of 90Sr (Strontium 90) in the baby teeth of kids near NPPs, finding it was above the amount in children farther away. And, following through, he found that the higher the 90Sr, the more cancer later in life.
As far as Mike’s claim of 1000 good jobs: The ongoing jobs at an NPP are less than half that, and the industry is hoping that SMNRs (Small Modular Nuclear Reactors) will require much fewer workers. But there will be 1000 jobs when spent fuel is swapped out for new fuel. Then, about every 18-24 months, 1000 people on contract will come to town, occupy motels, bars and restaurants for about a month, then be on their way to the next job. This won’t be local folks.
Another sad thing is to see people who snooze instead of muse believe that predictions of start-up times are sincerely made and are not prevarications. Climate change is not waiting for these never-on-time projects to be completed. The extraordinary timelines predicted have never been true. Nor is climate change waiting for the snoozers to wake up.
For years I thought the solution was better technology—solar panels, wind farms, electric cars. But I’ve come to see those are just quieter engines driving the same machine: a way of living that treats comfort as entitlement, the Earth as disposable, and future generations as acceptable collateral damage.
We’ve all been raised in this story—taught that progress means more, faster, cheaper, now.
We were told that if we just swapped our fuel source, we could keep the story going. Wind, solar, nuclear—all presented as clean ways to power the same wasteful habits. But the truth is, no energy source is clean when it’s feeding an economy that devours ecosystems and leaves future generations a dead planet in exchange for quarterly profits.
Nuclear power? It doesn’t spew carbon, but it generates waste that lasts longer than civilization has existed, risks catastrophe we cannot contain, and demands public subsidy to survive—just so we can keep the lights on in a culture addicted to excess.
The truth is, we are running out of time—not just to change our energy, but to change our story.
The climate is breaking. Species are vanishing. Soil, water, and air are being poisoned. And we still think the answer is better technology instead of a better way of living. But no amount of innovation can save us if we refuse to live within the limits of a living planet.
We don’t need cleaner engines to keep driving off a cliff—we need to slow down, turn around, and choose a different road entirely.
What if the real work isn’t figuring out how to power the world we’ve built… but how to imagine a world worth powering?
Sounds like reverting to Amish is your answer.
Kraig is spot on correct!
From the legendary 1980s book “Entropy” by Jeremy Rifkin; to today’s “de-growth” movement, we need to call a halt to the predatory capitalism and addictive consumptive systems that lead in only one direction: species, if not Planetary death.
Simply exchanging one energy source for another, while continuing to fuel these systems, is akin to going to a hospital with cancer, only to exchange it for heart disease.
Energy consumption is 1.) addictive (in a very clinical, literal sense), and 2.) entropic. Anyone familiar with the #1 Rule of Las Vegas casinos knows that — the House ALWAYS wins. We can never get so clever as to defeat the Laws of the Universe. And as Guy McPherson always says: Nature Bats Last!
Thank you Kraig!