On March 17th, 2023, ABC News reported that a cleanup was underway for 400,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked from Xcel Energy, a nuclear power plant in Monticello, Minnesota. However, the leak happened in November of 2022, and the people in the surrounding communities weren’t notified until March 2023, a full five months later!
An Xcel Energy spokesman said they didn’t tell anyone about the leak until March because it posed no health and safety risk to the local community or the environment. On the other hand, history tells us that radioactive contamination is a massive risk to our health and safety!
Xcel said they took comprehensive measures to address their plant’s situation and take safety very seriously.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Minnesota Department of Health, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources is monitoring the cleanup at the plant, which happens to be along the Mississippi River about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis.
Xcel Energy said the leak contained tritium levels, a byproduct of producing electricity at nuclear power plants. It emits low levels of radiation. They also said that they have been pumping, storing, and processing the water from the leak for reuse, and so far, they have recovered 25% of the tritium, leaving 75% still not cleaned up.
Xcel stated that they also monitor two dozen wells in the area and don’t believe it has affected local drinking water. But they wouldn’t be monitoring those wells if they knew for sure!
This is a developing story, so it remains to be seen whether any of this radioactive water makes it into groundwater supplies and makes the people of Minnesota sick. If it did, it wouldn’t be the first time. It also wouldn’t be the first time an energy company said that a leak was safe when it wasn’t.
The central point to be made from this story is that a 400,000-gallon radioactive water leak happened, and the energy company did not tell surrounding communities immediately. They did not know whether this water would affect groundwater supplies. Nor did they know whether people were drinking contaminated water.
That contaminated water could have made it into the drinking water. Children, babies, the elderly, and everyone else could have been drinking it. They could have developed cancer or even died!
This is another example of why you can’t trust local governments, manufacturers, energy plants, or even the media to tell you when your water is unsafe. Usually, people find out that their water is unsafe after they have been drinking that unsafe water for a long period of time. That’s why 10% of the drinking water surrounding nuclear facilities exceeds the EPA standards for radioactive contamination. That’s why people have gotten sick. And that’s why there have been massive lawsuits and settlements.
