By Nukewatch Staff
To prepare its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) regarding Xcel Energy’s license extension application for its Monticello reactor, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to establish a formal information-gathering period. The data collection time-frame officially ended on August 18, 2023.
According to Xcel Energy and NRC documents reviewed by Nukewatch, the NRC seems to have coincidentally picked for its end date the very day that radioactive tritium contamination in a groundwater test well near the Mississippi River exceeded the federal EPA safe drinking water limit.
In Xcel’s December 18, 2023 response to an NRC information request on its relicense application, Xcel submitted a table documenting the results of monitoring well tests between November 21, 2022 and August 18, 2023. Xcel’s table notes that the level of tritium in monitoring well (MW)-37A between July 27, 2023 and August 18, 2023 grew five-fold until, on August 18, it exceeded the EPA safe drinking water limit of 20,000 pico-curies-per-liter (pCi/L).
The NRC is currently considering Xcel’s application for a second 20-year license extension which, if granted, would allow the Monticello reactor in Minn., to run until 2050, when it would be 80 years old.
The NRC’s data collection cut-off date omits the critical time-frame immediately after August 18, when tritium levels near the Mississippi River were still increasing.
Similarly, Xcel’s “2023 Annual Radioactive Effluent Release Report” fails to provide precise data on monitoring well test results following August 18, 2023, noting only in general terms that tests done after that date found no unsafe levels of contamination. “The NRC should demand that Xcel provide well test results from August 18, 2023, through December 31, 2023, and should then enter these into the Federal Register for public consideration,” said Nukewatch’s Lindsay Potter, who discovered the coincidence. “The DEIS and license renewal process is incomplete without this information and should not move forward without it,” she said.
The reactor caused a leak to onsite groundwater of some 829,000 gallons of tritium-contaminated cooling water beginning in November 2022. In the same reply to the NRC December 18, 2023, Xcel reported that it had doubled its estimated volume of tritium-contaminated cooling water that had leaked to 829,000 gallons, not 400,000 gallons as it first reported.
The NRC acknowledges in its DEIS: “From available sampling data … tritium activity in wells MW-29A and MW-37A, which are near the river, were above the 20,000 pCi/L drinking water standard and trending in an upward direction as of August 2023.”
Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen — impossible to remove from water — which crosses the placenta and can cause cancer if ingested or inhaled.
Leave a Reply