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July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Xcel’s String of Radioactive Releases

Utility’s Dirty Record at Monticello

Xcel Energy, Inc., the giant utility and natural gas delivery firm based in Minneapolis, Minn., has more than 5.8 million customers across eight states. The company’s PR says it will be carbon neutral by 2050, and that its nuclear power operations are “safe” and “clean” — even after its 829,000-gallon leak of highly radioactive cooling water in late 2022. As if such an industrial giant cares about nature, its website says, “We’re building a future powered by clean, reliable, affordable energy.”

In fact, Xcel’s reactors are expensive, unreliable — being regularly shut down by mishaps or refueling — and produce dirty, deadly, long-lived radioactive wastes every day. Xcel’s three old reactors in Minnesota, like all reactors everywhere, routinely release radioactive gases and liquids to the air and to water bodies.[1]

And Xcel’s reactor operations have a long history of both accidental and deliberate radioactive releases. Many of Xcel’s radiation accidents and intentional dispersals have been reported in news and regulatory reports, cited here. They are worth noting in view of the company’s pro-nuclear, greenwashing PR.

• On March 19, 2025, when the reactor was roaring at 97 percent power, its pressure vessel water level dropped and caused an unplanned emergency reactor shutdown. [2] The cause of the cooling water loss is “under investigation.” The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) reported that before the shutdown, “a single feedwater pump tripped which would lower [the] reactor water level.” Reactor expert David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote about this incident: “The Three Mile Island-2 accident was initiated when a condensate cleanup system miscue tripped a feedwater pump.” (NRC Event Report No. 57618, Monticello; David Lochbaum, email to Nukewatch, March 20, 2025)

• On December 14, 2023, Xcel was fined $14,000 by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) for exceeding radioactive water storage limits. Xcel was storing more than 400,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated groundwater above a legal limit in temporary tanks without a permit. (MPCA, Dec. 14, 2023, https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/xcel-energy-inc-fined-14000-related-to-tritiated-water-storage-at-monticello-nuclear-facility)

• On May 26, 2023, Xcel reported a spill of 300-600 gallons of contaminated groundwater, with tritium activity of 194,000 picocuries per-liter, that overflowed from a holding tank onto the ground near the well from which it was pumped. Extensive pumping of groundwater is attempting to recover some of the tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and other radioactive materials released in the major cooling water leak of 2022-2023. (NRC Event Reports for 05/24/2023 – 05/25/2023, Power Reactor Event Number 56535; and NRC [document] 2023-TN9610; Xcel 2023-TN9609)

• Beginning sometime in late 2022 or earlier, one or two 50-year-old corroded underground pipes leaked an estimated 829,000 gallons of highly radioactive cooling water — with tritium activity over 5-million picocuries per-liter — into the ground, and the plume of tritiated groundwater reached the Mississippi River by spring 2023. [See below] (NRC, “Environmental Impact Statement Regarding Subsequent License Renewal for Monticello, Draft Report for Comment, April 2024, p.3-47 https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2410/ML24102A276.pdf)

• In July 2015, Federal investigators accused Xcel of willfully violating inspecting procedures and falsifying their reports about safety-related welding tests of radioactive waste casks. (“Feds allege Xcel contractors falsified weld tests at Monticello nuclear plant,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, July 28, 2015)

• In 2009, workers found tritium-contaminated water leaking from an electrical conduit inside the reactor building basement. Xcel later said the leak had contaminated groundwater in concentrations above the 20,000 PiC/L drinking water maximum. (St. Paul Pioneer Press, Sept. 12 and 18, 2009)

• On September 11, 2008, a cable fault tripped the transformer which supplied power to the site. This resulted in a loss of off-site power and the plant automatically shut down. After the shut-down, the reactor suffered other equipment problems with safety-related systems. (“NRC Begins Special Inspection at Monticello,” NRC press release, Sept. 19, 2008)

• In January 2007, a 35,000-pound control box broke from its steel I-beam mount, fell onto a large steam pipe, and caused an unplanned, indefinite reactor shutdown. The mechanisms inside the control box malfunctioned and opened valves in four other steam pipes, said Jan Strasma of the NRC. The crash caused a loss of main steam line pressure prompting the reactor “scram.” The failure of welding holding the 13-ton box was likely caused by embrittlement and stress fatigue from 36 years of machine vibrations. (“A massive control box broke loose, triggering an indefinite shutdown,” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Jan. 17, 2007)

• On May 5, 1982, about 1,300 gallons of radioactive water leaked from the reactor into the Mississippi River in an accident that was said to be “no threat” to the public. (“A-water released by NSP,” Minneapolis Star, Dec. 29, 1971, p.29; “Reactor leak ‘no threat,’” Montreal Gazette, May 5, 1982, p. H15)

• On December 20, 1971, Xcel (then Northern States Power or NSP) intentionally dumped an estimated 8,500 gallons of cesium-137-contaminated wastewater into the Mississippi River “to conduct maintenance.” The city of Minneapolis temporarily shut off its drinking water intake from the Mississippi because of this release. (“Radioactive discharge fits state standards,” Minneapolis Star, Dec. 21, 1971, p.16)

• In November 1971, NSP discharged “about 50,000 gallons of low-level radioactive water from the Monticello [reactor] into the Mississippi to permit the repair of a loose baffle.” (“NSP to delay atom discharges,” The Minneapolis Star, Wed., November 24, 1971, p.23.)

Xcel still lying about 829,000-gallon cooling water leak, & threat to drinking water

On Xcel’s Monticello reactor website pages regarding recovery of groundwater contaminated by its massive leak, under the heading “Current status and background,” Xcel still falsely states: “Tritium has not been detected in drinking water, or in the [Mississippi] river despite increased sampling by the company and state regulators.”[3]

Xcel is doubly false here: First, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported that Monticello’s leaked tritium had been detected in the Mississippi River, as of March 2023; and, secondly, the great river is drinking water for up to 20 million people.

The NRC’s Environmental Project Management Branch 1 Chief Stephen Koenick, at a public hearing in Monticello, Minn. May 15, 2024, said in part: “[A]s you have looked in our Draft Environmental Impact Statement [DEIS], we do conclude there were some very low concentrations of tritium in the Mississippi River.”

The DEIS says: “Tritium detections in wells near the Mississippi Riverbank … in 2023 indicate tritium-impacted groundwater likely discharged to the river. Minor levels … of tritium were measured in river samples in March and April 2023.”[4]

The same Xcel web page even makes this ludicrously self-incriminating claim: “The radiation levels in the leaked water are so low that, even if it were to enter a drinking water source, a person could drink it and it would be as safe as the food they eat on an average day.”

Xcel’s massive leak contained 5,020,000 picocuries of tritium per-liter (measured Nov. 2022), while the U.S. EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act limit is 20,000 picocuries per-liter. — Nukewatch Fact Sheet
_________
Notes
[1] Xcel Energy, “2023 Annual Radioactive Effluent Release Report,” Dec. 18, 2023, https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2413/ML24135A191.pdf; The Guardian, “Radioactive material and pesticides among new contaminants found in U.S. tap water,” Nov. 3, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/03/us-tap-water-contaminants-discovery-radioactive-material-pesticides
[2] The reactor pressure vessel contains the uranium fuel rods, reactor cooling water, the reactor core, and fittings to direct cooling water circulation.
[3] XcelEnergy.com, accessed May 2, 2025, https://mn.my.xcelenergy.com/s/outage-safety/public-safety/monticello-groundwater
[4] NRC, “Environmental Impact Statement Regarding Subsequent License Renewal for Monticello, Draft Report for Comment, April 2024, p.3-47 https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2410/ML24102A276.pdf

July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Who Has Time to Think About Nuclear Weapons?

Nukewatch’s Kelly Lundeen was arrested with 16 other abolitionists including Frida Berrigan whose article follows at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, demanding that the U.S. join the nuclear weapons ban treaty. See report, p. 3. Photo: Ellen Grady.

By Frida Berrigan

Nuclear weapons might be low on the list of most people’s concerns right now, but resisting them has never been more important.

“Pretty far from the pulse.” That was the comment someone on social media wrote below a photo of me getting arrested at an anti-nuclear protest near the United Nations in early March. Despite being strangely immune to my winning smile and pooh-poohing someone else’s work and passion to perhaps feel a bit superior, that person wasn’t wrong. After all, who has time to think about nuclear weapons when there’s so much else to worry about: Trump-Musk’s kleptocracy and government-busting, the daily fresh hell of Trump-Vance’s war on woke or the rise of white nationalists. Nuclear weapons — the most powerful and destructive weapon in the world — are not even on most people’s list of top 10 fears or top 10 causes they care about.

Unfortunately, this lack of interest doesn’t mean that nuclear weapons have somehow auto-disarmed. Thankfully, there is a serious, militant, and ever burgeoning international movement — mostly from the Global South — that is working toward nuclear abolition and that has led to the creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty came out of grassroots organizing initiated by the nations most affected by nuclear weapons every day. It is no small feat that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed and ratified by half the world’s governments. Sadly (but not surprisingly), the United States — the world’s largest nuclear power and only country to use nuclear weapons in war — has yet to sign on.

And that’s the reason I was in New York City on March 5, standing on First Avenue and 45th Street, with my hands behind my back in metal handcuffs. While parties to the TPNW were meeting inside the United Nations, protesters convened by the Atlantic Life Community, Nukewatch, and War Resisters League were standing outside, calling on a recalcitrant United States to send someone from the U.S. Mission to attend.

The goal was to block traffic in front of the United Nations, ostensibly making it easier for the U.S. delegation to get to the meeting. As we prepared to block traffic, I grabbed onto the banner imploring the U.S. to join the treaty. It was 40 feet long, made of taped strips of paper, and extremely fragile and slippery. Holding onto it in the late winter wind took so much concentration that I forgot to be fearful as I stepped into traffic. A block away, another team carried a banner saying “Ban nuclear weapons which are illegal and immoral.”

It was a moment of genuine happiness. In the end, 17 of us were arrested. Although we didn’t convince the U.S. to send anyone to the treaty meeting, we did make a pretty big stink — and a team from our group wheatpasted the text of the related Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty onto the ground in front of the U.S. Mission.

So, going back to that person who commented “pretty far from the pulse” on the photo of my arrest, I’ll say this: The pulse is the resistance — and it is inside the resister. It gets bigger when we resist together, it helps us overcome fear and stay connected. In actions large or small, individual acts or mass movements, photographed or unnoticed, the pulse is there in the resistance. We couldn’t be closer to the pulse, because it is inside of us!

— Frida Berrigan is an author and columnist with Waging Nonviolence. This article, originally published at wagingnonviolence.org, was shortened for space.

July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. ‘Nuclear Umbrella’ is a Death Wish

**Mark Taylor creates & donates political art for Nukewatch and has more at www.DeMOCKracy.ink**

Some recent headlines speak volumes of thoughtless mush.

“Europe Is Ready to Shelter Under France’s Nuclear Umbrella” (Foreign Policy); “Can Europe Build Its Own Nuclear Umbrella?” (FirstPost); “France has a nuclear umbrella. Could its European allies fit under it?” (BBC); “To many in Europe, Trump has punched holes in NATO’s nuclear umbrella” (CNN); “Canada’s allies are wondering if they can still shelter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella” (CBS).

The phrase “nuclear umbrella” is designed to evoke the image of an impenetrable shield of protection. In the comforting euphemism of diplomats, the phrase means a promise to “defend” compliant non-nuclear states using nuclear weapons. In military circles, it is one government’s threat to attack a third country with nuclear weapons on behalf of an ally that has no nukes.

The practice of holding a “nuclear umbrella” for allies is sometimes called “extended deterrence.” It’s been offered by the United States to nuclear-free European countries, along with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and others.

CNN reported that Polish President Andrzej Duda, on March 13, called on President Trump to deploy U.S. nuclear weapons in Poland, much like it does in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. CBS News reported on May 7 that current talk of the “nuclear umbrella” is “driven by Trump’s threats not to protect allies that don’t meet his expectations.”

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported recently that Europeans “seriously worry about whether Washington will continue to extend nuclear deterrence — sometimes referred to as a nuclear ‘umbrella’ — to the continent.” The “Europeans” the CEIP refers to are only those who have no understanding of nuclear weapons.

Use of the sugar-coated word “deterrence” hides the ghastly, devastating, suicidal reality of nuclear weapons attacks, and has the additional power of teaching the public to live in fear of other countries. As one vice president of a group called “Liberal International” put it recently, “The U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe is the ultimate defense against hostilities toward NATO countries.” The question “What would a nuclear attack achieve?” never enters the conversation.

The late Daniel Ellsberg, as an advisor to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, drafted plans for nuclear attacks. He wrote in The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, “The plan called for a total of 40 megatons — megatons — on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima.” In Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, Ellsberg says about this plan, “Our private, top-secret estimates were that we would kill every European, a hundred million Europeans, without a single U.S. or Soviet warhead landing on West Europe. Just from the fallout of the attacks we were planning on Russia and East Europe. One hundred million.”

The self-destructive nature of nuclear war was understood by some Europeans, including Germany’s (future Chancellor) Helmut Schmidt, who warned in his 1962 book Defense or Retaliation that the use of U.S. nuclear weapons “will not defend Europe, but destroy it.”

Today’s editors and heads of state ought to be focused on how to eliminate nuclear umbrellas rather than hundreds of millions of compatriots, allies and friends. — JL

July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

President Trump to Remove Nuclear Power Guardrails

From Beyond Nuclear, May 15, 2025

On May 14, 2025, E&E News online updated reports on President Donald Trump’s four “pre-decisional” White House Executive Orders to radically alter the historic role of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to oversee the performance of reactor design “safety reviews” and the regulatory approval of reactor siting, construction, and operation for commercial nuclear power reactors.

In President Trump’s view, the NRC’s “overly burdensome regulations” are the primary obstacle to guaranteeing the development and construction of a national “nuclear renaissance.” As a result, the White House is eyeing a “wholesale regulatory revision” of the NRC that includes mandatory “reductions in force.” Simultaneously, the White House is considering authorizing the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD) to take charge of quadrupling the current domestic nuclear power capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050. In order to achieve this goal, the draft Executive Orders outline: 1) “overhauling NRC”; 2) significantly accelerating “nuclear R&D”; 3) redefining commercial nuclear power development as critical “national security” infrastructure; and 4) dramatically expanding the U.S. “nuclear supply chain” to include ramping up domestic uranium mining, milling, enrichment, and fabrication of nuclear reactor fuel.

While no energy generation system is entirely domestically sourced, the U.S. nuclear fuel supply is predominantly sourced through foreign imports. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency
reporting in 2025, U.S. domestic uranium mines produce roughly 1% of the uranium concentrate U3O8 (triuranium octoxide or uranium yellowcake), needed to fuel the current U.S. reactor fleet in 2023. Foreign imports accounted for 99% of our nation’s U3O8, with 48% coming from Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Presently, Russia is also the only commercially viable global supplier of high-assay, low enriched uranium fuel needed for proposed Small Modular Reactor designs, including Bill Gate’s TerraPower “Natrium” liquid sodium-cooled fast reactor and X-Energy’s Xe-100 high-temperature, gas-cooled, pebble-bed reactor.

A Trump Administration Executive Order says that it will no longer recognize federal agencies as “independent” but rather will consider all of them subject to presidential supervision and control. All “significant regulatory actions” of the NRC would be reviewed by the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, or OIRA, opening the process to White House review for comments, edits, and influence. E&E News observed that the new process “obscures the public record of internal commission deliberations” and is an apparent violation of the Atomic Energy Act which clearly mandates that NRC decision-making remain independent.

The draft order to overhaul the NRC would also require the agency to reconsider its standard for radiation exposure where it now understands that there is no safe dose of radiation. Dr. Edwin Lyman, a physicist and Director of Nuclear Power Safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, is quoted in the E&E News article, saying, “Documented scientific evidence has only indicated that [low-level radiation exposure] is more dangerous than was known decades ago, when these standards were set.” Furthermore, Dr. Lyman adds, “Evidence has emerged about the impact of the level of radiation exposure on cardiovascular disease.”

The White House draft order to reframe nuclear power deployment for “national security” sets up the DOE and the DOD to “work around the NRC-led licensing and safety review processes” by providing the Secretaries of Defense and Energy accelerated schedules to “identify military facilities at which advanced nuclear technologies can be immediately installed and deployed.” Those military base-sited nuclear power reactors could then provide transmission to the electric grid for commercial power.

It is alarming that Trump’s Executive Orders fast tracking the still theoretical and cost-prohibitive construction of unproven “Generation IV” reactors by destroying the NRC comes at precisely the wrong time.

This is the 50th Anniversary Year of the creation of the NRC, following the abolition of the Atomic Energy Commission by Congress, because of the AEC’s blatant fast-track promotion and licensing of power reactors, and its disregard for public health and safety. Today, too many of those aging and deteriorating nuclear power stations are approaching or have exceeded 50 years of harsh operating experience involving: radioactive neutron bombardment; embrittlement; cracking in base metal and weld materials; and metallic fatigue and corrosion under a combination of extreme heat, high pressure, and heavy vibration. Nobody knows better the growing level of uncertainty, the multitude of technical knowledge gaps, and innumerable shrinking reactor safety margins thank those NRC nuclear engineers fired by executive order. Certainly, not Trump.

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