Quarterly Newsletter

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Opinion: Cancer Machines: Nuclear Power and Waste

By Susu Jeffrey

The Monticello nuclear power reactor is on the Mississippi River about 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, Minn. Xcel Energy’s two other Prairie Island reactors, plus about 50 giant dry casks storing waste reactor fuel, are all in the floodplain of the Mississippi, and adjacent to the Prairie Island Indian Community reservation. This radioactive waste is 48 miles southeast of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

There are no plans to move the waste off-island because there is no national, state, or municipal dump licensed for this deadly material. In fact, 34 more concrete encased steel waste casks are planned to be filled. Think of these waste container sites, like the 94 reactors at 54 U.S. sites, as permanent radioactive waste dumps.

The greater Twin Cities’ 3.7-million people are in the nuclear “shadow” (within 50 miles) of all three of Xcel’s nukes. The Mississippi River serves 20 million people with drinking water, way beyond Minnesota’s population of 5.7 million. Xcels’s aging nukes are a national threat.

The Monticello reactor was licensed for 40 years in 1970, and went online in 1971, the year it had two radioactive cesium spills. In 2010, its license was renewed for another 20 years until 2030. Xcel Energy has even been granted an extension for another 20 years until 2050. Octogenarian nukes are considered “safe enough” now by the nuclear/government consortium. The relicensing is a corporate/financial security move recently approved by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission. Paperwork is one thing, pipes are another.

In November 2022, a 50-year-old underground pipe leaked 829,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated cooling water into the groundwater, some of which reached the Mississippi River according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Xcel failed to make the radioactive spill public for four months. At a May 15, 2024 public hearing in Monticello where citizens testified “We don’t trust you. You lie,” an NRC executive “clarified” and apologized for the NRC’s and Xcel’s “miscommunication” that none was found in the Great River. Senior NRC Environmental Project Manager Stephen J. Koenick admitted some tritium had been measured in the Mississippi. Tritium bonds with water and cannot be separated out. The runaway tritium will persist in the environment for ten half-lives or about 123 years. For approximately the next six generations, it will be a part of the drinking water wherever those isotopes wander.

There is no telling where Xcel’s radioactive pollution will land among the 50 percent of men and 33 percent of women currently estimated to host a cancer invasion during our lifetimes. (National Public Radio, Feb. 17, 2025) There is tremendous popular, fear-driven support for the oncology industry. The good news is that while cancer numbers are up so is the cancer survival rate. However, at nuclear weapons, reactor and radioactive waste sites, “accidents” happen, along with permitted and routine radioactive emissions. Radioactivity cannot be contained. When I was a newspaper reporter in Brevard County, Florida, where Cape Canaveral is located, I learned that nuclear waste cannot be rocketed off into space because it’s too hot, too heavy, and because the rockets are too faulty.

Nuclear safety regulations changing

Some of President Trump’s cost-cutting executive orders will slash the NRC’s radiation exposure standards, cut commission staff, delete or “revise” regulations, trash the commission’s independent status, and make reactor operations more dangerous than ever.

Joseph Mangano and Ernest Sternglass did a study of eight downwind U.S. communities in the two years after a nuclear reactor closure. A remarkable 17.4 percent drop in infant mortality was found. “We finally have peer-reviewed accurate data attaching nuclear power reactors to death and injury in the host communities,” New York State Assemblyman Richard Brodsky said of the 2002 report in the Archives of Environmental Health. Some of Mangano’s more recent work is cited on the following page.

Show your support for Nukewatch and our work to protect air, water, soil, and living ecosystems from profiteering by weapons manufacturers, utilities, and mining companies. Put your dollars to work educating, protesting & resisting nuclear weapons, reactors, and waste.

Monopoly capitalism or public service?

Clearly the Monticello reactor was designed to make money. In November 2024, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison wrote that Xcel has “aggressively” pursued multi-year rate hikes while earning large profits. In 2024 Xcel reported $1.94-billion net earnings, a profit margin up 14% from 2023.

According to Xcel propaganda, its 54-year-old reactor is “the biggest employer and largest local taxpayer” in Monticello, Minn., and generates an estimated $550 million in regional economic activity each year. And like profits, cancer rates are up notably among people under 50, and rising faster among women than men, the American Cancer Society reports.

Selling piecemeal fix-it parts for geriatric machinery is a lucrative business. Locating a leaking, underground cooling water pipe, between buildings, and removing and replacing it, was a non-negotiable emergency at an old nuclear reactor with miles of underground piping. These expenses figure into utility rate hikes.

Xcel eventually wins its rate increases and re-licensing “asks.” These asks get rewritten and resubmitted until a “compromise” is reached. In 2025, residential customers will pay $5.39 more per month, down from the original ask of $9.89, according to Minnesota Public Radio. In April this year Xcel Energy applied to increase overall electric rates by 11.8 percent in 2026 and roughly 7.2 percent in 2027, or by $150.7 million over the two years.

Cancer

St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital advertises heavily with videos of big-eyed, bald children cancer patients. In a review of published studies of 136 nuclear reactor sites in the European Journal of Cancer Care in 2007, elevated leukemia disease rates in children were documented in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Japan, and Canada. This is not a new story.

The danger of intellectual disabilities in fetuses exposed in the womb was reported in The New York Times, page A1 on Dec. 20, 1989. Ingested tritium crosses the placenta. In addition to the health costs of breathing and ingesting emissions from operating reactors, there is the costly problem of how to containerize its long-lived waste, but that’s another book-length article.

⸺ The public is encouraged to oppose Xcel’s current two-tier rate increase request. The firm wants 9.6% more this year, and another 3.6% in 2026. Written comments are being taken until Dec. 30, 2025. For talking points and the address to write, see: nuclearfreemississippi.wordpress.com

⸺ Susu Jeffrey is a poet and writer living in Minneapolis. She has opposed nuclear weapons and nuclear power since before her 1977 arrest at the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire.

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Returned to UK Airbase

In England, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) reports that new U.S. B61-12 hydrogen bombs were secretly delivered to the UK’s Royal Air Force Base Lakenheath, in Suffolk, on July 16th. This transfer of U.S. H-bombs marks the first time since 2008 that the Pentagon has deployed its nuclear weapons in Britain. Prior to 2008, U.S. bombs had been stationed in the UK for 50 years.

The number of B61-12s has not been disclosed or leaked. Analysts identified an aircraft from the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, bound for Lakenheath, according to Newsweek July 22nd and Bloomberg News July 28th. Kirtland Air Force Base is the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force “Nuclear Weapons Center,” a main nuclear weapons storage site and training ground for nuclear weapons attacks.

CND also wrote, “Despite being called an “RAF” [Royal Air Force] station, Lakenheath is run by the U.S. Air Force and currently only hosts USAF units and personnel.” This is why anti-war campaigners describe the base as “USAF Lakenheath.” The base hosts about 6,000 personnel, and is “the largest deployment of USAF personnel in Britain.”

**Aerial view of RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, England**

Earlier, about 100 of the new H-bombs were secretly transferred to NATO bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, and possibly Turkey. On January 16, Jill Hruby, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, announced, “The new B61-12 [thermonuclear] gravity bombs are fully forward deployed, and we have increased NATO’s visibility to our nuclear capabilities….”

The U.S. proliferation of the first-strike accurate air-drop gravity bombs to Europe needlessly destabilizes the shooting war between Russia and Ukraine, where operating nuclear reactors are potential targets and where attacks with nuclear warheads have been threatened.

As we’ve reported earlier, the delivery of U.S. nuclear weapons to governments party to the 1970 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons or NPT, is an open violation of the treaty’s Articles I and II which prohibit any such “transfer” of nuclear weapons for any reason whatsoever. When Russia, in 2023, moved some of its nuclear weapons to stations in Belarus, the U.S. didn’t condemn the transfer as a violation of the NPT, as that would have unmasked the Pentagon’s own lawlessness. ⸺ JML

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

A Gold Mine of Profiteering

12 Democrats Warn of “Massively Corrupt” Missile Defense Plans

A dozen Senate and House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth July 8th, calling the proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense program a corrupt waste of taxpayers’ dollars that, like its earlier versions, can’t work.

“[P]lans for Golden Dome could make it prohibitively expensive, operationally ineffective, massively corrupt, and detrimental to U.S. and global security by igniting a nuclear arms race with Russia and China,” the Democrats wrote. “We are concerned that Golden Dome will be much more effective at wasting taxpayer dollars than countering missile attacks. We urge you to rein in this dangerous plan.”

Led by Senators. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Reps. John Garamendi, D-Calif., and Don Beyer, D-Virg., the letter warned that, “Estimates by the Congressional Budget Office [are] that the system could cost up to $542 billion to complete, more than three times the cost that the Trump administration projected…”

To save some money on the boondoggle, Montana Republican Senator Steve Daines has proposed a federal exemption from the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements applying to major government construction projects.

Environmental protection is the function of NEPA, but meeting its requirements would slow and vastly increase the cost of replacing the 400 underground missile silos, their 40 launch control centers, and hundreds of miles of buried cables that connect them.

Senator Daines, a long-standing member of the ICBM Lobby who has 150 Minuteman missiles in his state, and who has worked strenuously to create support for outdated and dangerous U.S. land-based missile systems, offered an amendment to the must-pass military appropriations bill, that would exempt the Air Force from NEPA compliance. Congress may lawfully exempt the Golden Dome plan and any other Pentagon project from NEPA requirements if Sec. Hegseth declares that “it is critical to national security,” or “is necessary for national defense.” Under NEPA rules, Hegseth must inform Congress of the reasons for any exemption, but the reasons may be classified “secret” if he determines it is “necessary for reasons of national security.”
⸺ JML

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Shrimp Sold at Walmart, Kroger and Elsewhere Across 29 States Recalled over Radioactive Contamination

Source of carcinogenic, reactor-borne cesium-137 under investigation

By John LaForge

In a story unprecedented in Nukewatch Quarterly memory, multiple cargo containers carrying shrimp from Indonesia to U.S. grocers were found contaminated with dangerously radioactive
cesium-137 (Cs-137)

None of the dozens of reports reviewed by Nukewatch explained how the cancer-causing isotope Cs-137⸺ a human-made radionuclide only produced inside nuclear reactors ⸺ spread to multiple cargo containers.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) alerted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) August 19 about the contamination of the containers and shrimp products processed in Indonesia. The tainted containers and shrimp were found at the U.S. ports of Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, and Savannah (Georgia), and delivered to Walmart and Kroger stores.

The cesium scare has expanded broadly. The FDA’s August 19 Import Alert and recall recommendation focused on frozen raw shrimp, but the FDA later added cocktail shrimp and cooked medium peeled tail-off shrimp to its list of at-risk products. Initially applied to 13 states, the FDA later expanded its recall recommendation to 29 states.

Radioactively Contaminated Shrimp

The Wall St. Journal reported August 29 that the recall included 26,460 packages of Great Value cocktail shrimp sold at Walmart stores between July 28 and August 16, and 18,000 bags of Kroger’s Mercado frozen cooked shrimp.

California-based Southwind Foods recalled frozen shrimp bagged and sold under the brands Sand Bar, Arctic Shores, Best Yet, Great American Seafood Imports, and First Street, or Walmart’s Great Value brand.

Tens of thousands of packages of imported shrimp sold at Mariano’s were also recalled. Other affected stores include AquaStar, Baker’s, Gerbes, Jay C, Metro Market, Pay Less Supermarkets, Pick ‘n Save and Beaver Street Fisheries, according to the FDA, which told consumers to dispose of shrimp purchased at specific times in July and August. “If you have recently purchased raw frozen shrimp from Walmart that matches this description, throw it away,” the FDA said in a statement. The FDA did not recommend any special disposal system for radioactively contaminated material.

The FDA notification said, “All containers and product testing positive or alerting for Cs-137 have been denied entry into the country.” Neither the FDA nor the CBP have reported how many containers were found to be contaminated.

All the recalled shrimp came from Indonesia’s giant seafood processor PT Bahari Makmur Sejati, doing business as BMS Foods. The FDA has now targeted the firm with a new “import alert” to stop all its products from coming into the U.S.

The potentially hot shrimp was available from July 17 to August 8, 2025, at dozens of stores in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Is the cesium permitted in U.S. food safe?

The legally permitted level of Cs-137 contamination in U.S. food is 1,200 Becquerels per-kilogram (Bq/kg) ⸺ even for children. Japan’s permitted level for children is 50 Bq/kg, and 100 Bq/kg for adults. A Becquerel is a standard measure of radioactive decay.

In the United States, the same level of cesium contamination in food is allowed for women, girls, and infants, in spite of the well-established fact that they are far more vulnerable to radiation harm than men and boys.

Radiation and health expert Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear in Tacoma Park, Maryland, reported in 2013 that, “As cesium passes out of your body, its radioactivity starts to damage your kidneys and your bladder, which in turn damages your body’s ability to rid itself of the cesium.” Folkers also noted that Cs-137 and Cs-134 do not occur in nature but are only created in nuclear reactors operated by the military, by industry, and by university researchers.

The FDA’s Import Alert warned about the Cs-137:

[R]adionuclides such as Cs-137, a radioisotope of cesium, can be present in many places around the world as a result of contamination produced high in the atmosphere during nuclear testing. Cs-137 is created via nuclear reactions, such as occurring in nuclear power plants and is also commonly used in medical and other industrial applications. Elevated amounts of Cs-137 can be present at locations where contamination settled from accidents such as Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011.

The Import Alert also described the health risks created by exposure to low doses of Cs-137:

Cs-137 emits beta particles and gamma radiation that are associated with adverse health effects. Potential for health concerns following Cs-137 exposure depends on the dose and the duration of exposure. High doses lead to acute radiation syndrome. However, exposure to low doses spread out over a period of time may not cause immediate apparent adverse effects but may still be harmful. The primary health effect of concern following longer term, repeated low dose exposure (e.g., through consumption of contaminated food or water over time) is cancer, resulting from damage to DNA within living cells of the body.

Where’d the cesium-137 come from?

Beyond Nuclear.org reported that the FDA is still investigating, “but contamination could be from nuclear industries in China, releases from the ruined Fukushima reactors, or somewhere else.”

Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility (CCNR), wrote September 10, 2025, “It is possible that the cesium-137 contamination came from a “food irradiation” plant, as the two radioactive substances most used in “irradiation” facilities are cobalt-60 and cesium-137.

Both cobalt-60 and cesium-137 are powerful gamma radiation emitters and are used to sterilize medical equipment, and to sterilize certain food items in “food irradiation” facilities. These plants use “very large quantities of cobalt-60 or cesium-137. Shrimp is one such food item,” Edwards wrote. For background on food irradiation see the CCNR website at https://ccnr.org/food_ccnr.html as well as https://ccnr.org/food_irradiation.html.

Kimberly Robertson, Program Director for the Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network, wrote August 26: “UK-based marine biologist Tim Deere-Jones stated, ‘Given the very low reported levels of Cs-137 in Indonesian marine environments, there is a strong possibility that the food fed to the [fish farmed] shrimp is the source of elevated cesium-137…. I consider it likely that such material, often harvested by ‘pirate fishers,’ could be contaminated with Fukushima-derived Cs-137, at endemically high levels in some Pacific Sea areas. It is strongly advised that the source/origin of the foodstuffs fed to the shrimps is investigated with the utmost rigor.’”

It is also possible that the contaminated shipping containers could have come into close contact with radioactive waste being shipped in the other containers on the same ship. It’s also possible, although highly unlikely and extremely scandalous, that the same containers used to ship the shrimp had earlier been used to transport radioactive waste.

Kimberly Robertson concluded her post urging: “Regardless of the exact source of the radioactive
contamination, [R.F.] Kennedy, as Secretary of the Dept. of Health and Human Services, must direct the FDA to lower the current allowable levels of cancer-causing Cs-137 in food. The shrimp radiation levels were detected at 68 Bq/kg, which would not have been allowed in Japan [due to its] 50 Bq/kg level for kids. U.S. kids, however, are allowed 1,200 Bq/kg, the same as adults. That must change.”

Sign and share the sign-on letter widely at https://nislappdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/FFAN-letter-to-HHS.pdf, and call the FDA at 1-888-SAFEFOOD to voice your concerns.

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Contact Us

Donate To Nukewatch

Stay Connected