A group of five environmental organizations is pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take a deeper look at environmental impacts from the proposed restart of the Palisades plant in Southwest Michigan.

A panel of NRC judges heard oral arguments this week to decide whether to hold a hearing.

The five groups — Beyond Nuclear, Don’t Waste Michigan, Michigan Safe Energy Future, Three Mile Island Alert and Nuclear Energy Information Service — filed a motion to have the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board reconsider several regulatory requirements for the restart going forward.

One contention from the groups is that the NRC should prepare an “Environmental Impact Statement” going into more detail than the agency did in its draft “Environmental Assessment.”

Terry Lodge, an attorney representing the environmental groups, said at Thursday’s hearing the existing environmental assessment doesn’t look closely enough at the potential for earthquakes.

“That is particularly important because there is, of course, going to be additional radioactive waste stored there.”

The NRC’s draft environmental assessment for the Palisades restart plan found there would be no significant environmental impact.

That finding came in part because the plant’s buildings are still standing, and nuclear waste is already being stored on site. Resuming operations at Palisades would likely have similar impacts to what happened there prior to 2022, the NRC concluded.

At Thursday’s hearing, a lawyer for the NRC said the five groups lacked standing to bring the claims, which she said came too late in the process anyway.

“Put plainly, there is no good cause if the information being challenged is not actually new and could have been raised earlier,” said NRC attorney Anita Ghosh Naber.

Holtec International has said it hopes to resume generating power at Palisades by the end of this year. The NRC has said it plans to complete its regulatory approval process by the end of July.

The University of Michigan is closing its office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and shutting down diversity initiatives campuswide, in response to executive orders from the Trump administration and internal discussions on campus.

The moves were announced in a campus-wide email from university President Santa Ono and other top leaders Thursday afternoon.

The changes will also affect the Office for Health Equity and Inclusion at Michigan Medicine.

In the email, university leaders acknowledged the diversity initiatives had been successful on some measures.

“First-generation undergraduate students, for example, have increased 46% and undergraduate Pell recipients have increased by more than 32%, driven in part by impactful programs such as Go Blue Guarantee and Wolverine Pathways,” the email read. “The work to remove barriers to student success is inherently challenging, and our leadership has played a vital role in shaping inclusive excellence throughout higher education.”

The University of Michigan has frequently been at the center of conversations about diversity on college campuses; it was the defendant in two lawsuits that reached the Supreme Court in 2003, resulting in rulings that partially struck down affirmative action programs on campus at the time.

Last year, the New York Times reported on UM’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, saying the university had poured more than a quarter of a billion dollars into the programs since 2016, but many critics remained on campus.

In 2023, the university launched what it called its DEI 2.0 strategic plan, which was announced as a five-year plan to run through 2028. On Thursday, the university announced it would abandon the plan, as part of the other cuts to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on campus. It said it would also update university websites to remove mentions of the DEI efforts.

In a post on the social media site “X”, university regent Sarah Hubbard said cutting the DEI offices on campus would free up money to spend on other student programs.

Today the University of Michigan is ending implementation of DEI.

We are eliminating programs, eliminating affiliated staff and ending the DEI 2.0 strategy.

Late last year we ended the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring. This is now expanded university wide and…

— Sarah Hubbard, Regent @umich (@RegentHubbard) March 27, 2025

“We are eliminating bureaucratic overspending and making Michigan more accessible,” Hubbard wrote, citing the expansion of the Go Blue Guarantee scholarship program, which had previously been announced by the university.

Editor’s note: The University of Michigan holds Michigan Public’s broadcast license.