A small town in Minnesota, home to around 14,564 people, has experienced two major radioactive water leaks from a nearby nuclear power plant months apart.
Xcel Energy spilled 400,000 gallons of toxic material in November – the public was made aware just this month – and the second leaked hundreds of gallons last week.
At the time of the most recent incident, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found at least 230 fish had died in the Mississippi River adjacent to the plant.
The agency and company claim ‘the fish kill was not caused by tritium,’ a radioactive isotope, but was due to a change in water temperature.
The plant temporarily closed on Saturday to fix the latest leak and stopped pumping warm water into the river, dramatically changing temperatures that ‘the fish get used to.’
‘The fish kill is unfortunate but not unexpected given the significant temperature change that can occur when warm water from the plant stops flowing to the river during a shutdown in operation,’ the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said Monday.
At the time of the most recent incident, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found at least 230 fish had died in the Mississippi River adjacent to the plant
DailyMail.com has contacted Xcel Energy and Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
Xcel Energy is set to restart operations ‘next week’ but will temporarily close in mid-April for an annual maintenance project.
Xcel’s Theo Keith said more than 30 percent of the tritium had been recovered from groundwater, and the clean-up process will continue over the next year
Chris Clark, president of Xcel Energy–Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said Thursday in a statement regarding the recent leak: ‘While the leak continues to pose no risk to the public or the environment, we determined the best course of action is to power down the plant and perform the permanent repairs immediately.’
The water contained tritium, a rare and radioactive isotope of hydrogen with a half-life of about 12 years.
Tritium can enter the body through inhalation, ingestion or absorption through the skin.
Xcel Energy spilled 400,000 gallons of toxic material in November – the public was made aware just this month – and the second leaked hundreds of gallons last week
The Monticello plant is about 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, upstream from the city on the Mississippi River
It increases the risk of cancer if consumed in extremely large quantities, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).
Minnesota Health Commissioner Dan Huff told MPR News: ‘While tritium is radioactive, it’s low energy, and so it is not like plutonium.
‘If you were to sit it next to you in a glass, it would not hurt you.
‘If you drank it, it would increase your radiation exposure. And we want to limit radiation exposure because radiation can cause tissue damage.’
The Monticello plant is about 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, upstream from the city on the Mississippi River.
After the first leak was found in November, Xcel Energy made a short-term fix to capture water from a leaking pipe and reroute it back into the plant for reuse.
The solution was designed to prevent new tritium from reaching the groundwater until the installation of a replacement pipe during a regularly scheduled outage in mid-April, the company said.
However, monitoring equipment indicated Wednesday that a small amount of new water from the original leak had reached the groundwater.
Operators discovered that the temporary solution was no longer capturing all of the leaking water, Xcel Energy said.
In a statement, Xcel Energy reported the first leak to the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the state on November 22.
Since the leak occurred, Xcel Energy claims it has been pumping groundwater, storing and processing the contaminated water, which contains tritium levels below federal thresholds.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said tritium spills occasionally happen at nuclear plants, but it has repeatedly determined that they have either remained limited to the plant property or involved such low offsite levels that they did not affect public health or safety.
Xcel reported a small tritium leak at Monticello in 2009.
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