Nukewatch reprises NRC hiding radioactive leaks

Apologies are merely coverups where federal enforcement should be mandatory, not industry voluntary reporting

Nukewatch has reprised its public disclosure that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) deliberately plays down a significant potential public hazard pathway by most recently by misreporting that Xcel Energy’s Monticello nuclear power station had an large accidental radioactive release on November 22, 2022. This public health and environmental hazard pathway was through a series of leaks of at least 829,000 gallons of radioactive tritium (radioactive water) with readings of up to 5.2 million picocuries per liter that had been discharged into the Mississippi River northwest of Minneapolis (20,000 picocuries is the EPA protective threshold in drinking water).  Moreover, Excel Energy never issued any cautionary alerts to the public of the accident  for recreating downstream populations  or alert protective actions for downstream municipal drinking water treatment centers. The fact that the leaks reached the Mississippi river was withheld from the public for months. The Nukewatch reprise was published in October 1, 2024 edition of the Southside Pride “NRC Apologizes: Admits Monticello Reactor-Leaked Tritium Has Reached the Mississippi.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune had previously reported that the November 2022 radioactive leak from the nuclear power station operating on the banks of the Mississippi River is rated the sixth highest in the top ten highest radiation readings among US nuclear power reactors.  A NRC Office of Public Affairs officer for Region III, in Chicago, IL hastily announced that the radioactive spill did not reach the Mississippi River and was not a public threat. The event report was not publicly noticed by NRC until November 25, 2022. The radioactive release and the absence of regulatory attention was subsequently raised in public hearings by Nukewatch in public meetings convened by the NRC to discuss the environmental impacts of extending Monticello’s operating license with a second 20-year extension from 2030 to 2050. But it wasn’t until May 15, 2024 that a NRC representative publicly apologized for the agency’s misrepresentation that the radioactivity “had not reached the Mississippi River, a drinking water source for 20 million people including the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.”

“Misrepresentation” is a polite expression of the deliberate obfuscation by the nuclear industry, federal regulators and state officials of ongoing radioactive leaks that are springing from degraded and unmaintained pipes buried under aging nuclear power plants that contaminate groundwater, aquifers and surface water that provides water to the public, livestock and  agriculture.  Radioactive water has been routinely leaking into ground water for decades as nuclear power plants age and ignored public concerns expressed to the NRC during increasing extreme federal relicensing proceeding now going out to 80 years of operation.  According to the Associated Press, the regulatory outcome of hiding these radioactive leaks from the public has been going on for decades in what needs to be identified as a malicious scandal of nuclear industry and NRC coverups . However, as reprised again here by Nukewatch, public health and safety remains at the whim of NRC oversight and voluntary industry self reporting with no enforcement policy.

See more in the Beyond Nuclear report “Leak First, Fix Later” by Paul Gunter.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons