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.

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.