By John LaForge

I.F. Stone famously said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” The aphorism applies equally well to nuclear reactor operators, including Minneapolis based Xcel Energy.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has granted Xcel a second license extension for operating its 53-year-old Monticello reactor on the Mississippi River in Minnesota. The decision will permit this General Electric jalopy, a Fukushima clone, to run until it’s 80 years old — a dangerous feat that’s never been done in the history of nuclear power. The NRC received over 3,000 public comments mostly critical of the extension, but the commission has rubber-stamped 87 of 92 similar requests, so call the NRC “Never Really Concerned.”

The NRC nod is based partly on the commission’s Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the re-licensing, even though the document confirms that Xcel repeatedly made false statements about its massive 2022-23 leak of radioactive cooling water. According to a March 16, 2023, Associated Press (AP) story, Xcel’s first public response to the major leak was, “There’s no danger to the public.” Xcel then proceeded to understate by more than half the leak’s actual volume, estimating it was only 400,000 gallons.

Xcel eventually acknowledged that the volume of the leak, from an old corroded underground pipe, was 829,000 gallons, and that the groundwater plume of reactor cooling water — some of which would later reach the Mississippi River — had a radioactive footprint of some fourteen curies of tritium — a very large amount. (For reference, the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island released an estimated 15 curies of gaseous radioactive iodine-131 to the Pennsylvania atmosphere. Other radioactive materials went into the Susquehanna River.)

Xcel’s 829,000-gallon leak was always a direct threat to drinking water because — as the company’s own 2023 Annual Radioactive Effluent Release Report states on page 13 — “It is assumed groundwater continuously flows to the river…” The Mississippi is the drinking water source for 20 million people, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, and their surrounding suburbs 37 miles downstream from the leaky reactor.

The fact that Xcel’s radioactive groundwater plume would automatically move toward the Mississippi meant the leak posed a gargantuan public relations problem. Lying about it was Xcel’s and the NRC’s first action. One NRC spokesperson, Victoria Mitlyng, told WCCO TV News, March 17, 2023, “There is no pathway for the tritium to get into drinking water.”

This mis-step was so blatant that, following pressure from Nukewatch, NRC Senior Environmental Project Manager Stephen S. Koenick publicly apologized for the fudge, at an NRC open meeting in the city of Monticello, May 15, 2024. Koenick told the gathering, “I know we had meetings in which we reported there were no indication[s] of a tritium leak making it to the Mississippi. However, in our Draft Environmental Impact Statement, we do say, we do conclude there were some very low concentrations of tritium in the Mississippi River.”

Curies and picocuries: code language helps to confuse

When these radioactive accidents take place, public relations language is employed by the industry to confuse, befog, and try to trivialize their size, scope, and potential health and environmental effects. Xcel reported to the NRC Dec. 15, 2022 that its leaked cooling water contained 5,020,000 “picocuries of radioactive tritium per liter,” sometimes written as “picocuries/liter.” This concentration is 251 times the EPA’s allowable limit for drinking water.

A picocurie is one-trillionth of a curie. Anything in the world divisible by one trillion is naturally very large, and a curie is a very large cache of radioactivity indeed. One curie amounts to 37 billion atomic disintegrations-per-second.

The NRC’s final EIS states on page 3-48, “Monticello reported an abnormal discharge to the Mississippi River from tritium contaminated groundwater of 0.167 curies of tritium between 07/27/23 and 12/31/23….”

The figure “0.167 curies” may give the impression of a small amount, but this amount of tritium contamination leaked to the Mississippi translates to 167 billion picocuries. Again, 20,000 picocuries-per liter is the current EPA allowable drinking water limit.

Over seven million gallons of groundwater has been pumped from Xcel’s onsite wells to try and keep more tritium from reaching the Mississippi. The final EIS says about this pollution at page 3-206 “For the period from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023, a total of 0.388 Ci [curies] of tritium (released via natural evaporation from the temporary tanks and the groundwater remediation pond) was reported during calendar year 2023.” This is to say 388 billion picocuries of tritium were sent floating around Minnesota’s Wright and Sherburne counties. This underreported and unplanned, emergency stop-gap response poses some risk for the surrounding residents who breathe.

Xcel’s estimated leak of 14 curies of tritium will contaminate the moving groundwater for a very long time. Its radioactive half-life is 12.3 years, so the tritium will persist for about 12 decades while it decays to helium-3 (radioactive substances are considered hazardous for ten half lives). Once tritium contaminates water, it is impossibly expensive to remove. A new textbook on tritium reports, “its half-life is short enough that it is extremely radioactive. For a given mass, it is, for instance, about 150,000 times as radioactive, in terms of disintegrations per unit time, as plutonium-239. One teaspoon of tritiated water would contaminate about 100 billion gallons of water to the U.S. drinking water limit.”

Alarmingly, when tritium is internalized (ingested or inhaled) it can result in problem pregnancies, miscarriages, and birth abnormalities because this machine-made radioactive poison crosses the placenta where it threatens the fetus. Yet the NRC has neither imposed a penalty nor even issued a rebuke to Xcel for its enormous leak or for its public lying that still paints a false picture of its consequences.

Xcel’s home website seen Jan. 8, 2025 still includes the uncorrected notice of March 16, 2023 that claims, “Xcel Energy took swift action to contain the leak to the plant site, which poses no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment,” and in the next paragraph it still says, “the leaked water is fully contained on-site and has not been detected beyond the facility”. Of course, Xcel knows that nothing “contains” groundwater which is constantly moving willy-nilly. This company’s public pronouncements must not be believed.

The Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Mississippi River, made up of regional environmental, climate, and justice groups has vowed to see the reactor closed before the achy, breaky Monticello unit causes a more catastrophic radiation release.

— John LaForge and the Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Mississippi River, Lindsay Potter contributed research to this report.