Fears for Minnesota town where nuclear power plant leaked 400,000 gallons of toxic waste

A small Minnesota town, home to some 14,564 people, experienced two large releases of radioactive water from a nearby nuclear power plant months apart.

Xcel Energy spilled 400,000 gallons of toxic material in November (the public found out this month) and the second spilled hundreds of gallons last week.

At the time of the most recent incident, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that at least 230 fish had died in the Mississippi River adjacent to the plant.

The agency and the company claim that “the fish kills were not caused by tritium,” a radioactive isotope, but by a change in water temperature.

The plant temporarily shut down on Saturday to fix the latest leak and stopped pumping warm water into the river, drastically changing the temperatures “fish get used to.”

“The fish kills are unfortunate but not unexpected given the significant temperature change that can occur when warm water from the plant stops flowing into the river during an operational shutdown,” the New York Pollution Control Agency said Monday. Minnesota.

DailyMail.com has contacted Xcel Energy and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Xcel Energy is scheduled to restart ‘next week’, but will temporarily shut down 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 cleanup 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 that the best course of action is to shut down the plant and make 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 by inhalation, ingestion, or absorption through the skin.

Xcel Energy spilled 400,000 gallons of toxic material in November – the public only found out this month – and the second leaked hundreds of gallons last week

The Monticello plant is about 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, upstream of the city on the Mississippi River.

It increases the risk of cancer if consumed in extremely large amounts, according to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).

Minnesota Health Commissioner Dan Huff said MPR News: ‘Although tritium is radioactive, it is low energy, so it is not like plutonium.

‘If you sat it next to you in a glass, it wouldn’t hurt you.

‘If you were to drink it, you would increase your radiation exposure. And we want to limit radiation exposure because radiation can damage tissue.’

The Monticello plant is about 35 miles northwest of Minneapolis, upstream of the city on the Mississippi River.

After the first leak was found in November, Xcel Energy made a short-term solution to capture water from a leaking pipe and redirect it back to the plant for reuse.

The solution was designed to prevent new tritium from reaching groundwater until a replacement pipeline is installed during a regularly scheduled outage in mid-April, the company said.

However, the monitoring team indicated on Wednesday that a small amount of new water from the original leak had found its way into the groundwater.

Operators found that the temporary solution was no longer capturing all of the water that seeped in, 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, Xcel Energy says 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 occur at nuclear plants, but has repeatedly determined that they have remained confined to plant property or involved levels as low outside the site that did not affect public health or safety.

Xcel reported a small tritium leak at Monticello in 2009.