Beyond denial: Minnesota’s energy crossroads

by Susu Jeffrey

Nuclear power and cancer are usually not mentioned in the same sentence. Despite epidemic cancer statistics, cancer is marketed as a personal tragedy. Nuclear power is marketed as an economic issue. In the cost-benefit analysis of nuclear power, the costs of cancer, decommissioning damaged or retired plants, and paying for 240,000 years of high-level irradiated fuel storage are understated or ignored.

Nevertheless, the Minnesota legislature is revisiting its 1994 decision to phase out nuclear power and to remove nuclear waste from our state. The new governor and lawmakers are debating whether to extend the nuclear future to 2034 including the stockpiling of huge quantities of high-level nuclear waste beside the Mississippi River. A bill “authorizing the continued operation of the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear generating plants” supports relicensing Minnesota’s reactors and has no limit on amounts of nuclear waste storage at plant sites.

Only 19 percent of Minnesota’s electrical power is generated by the nuclear reactors that flank the Twin Cities about 40 miles upstream (Monticello) and downstream (Prairie Island) on the Mississippi. Eighteen million Americans drink out of the Mississippi. Amory Lovins, “energy czar” in President Jimmy Carter’s administration and the man who conceived of the “soft energy path,” estimates that at least 50 percent of our energy use could be cut through conservation. Conservation is the fastest method of energy savings with virtually instant payback. Conservation, such as retrofitting older buildings, is also a jobs-creation program. Conservation technology in new construction could be a business-creation and export bonanza for Minnesota.

But Minnesota isn’t talking about conserving power. Minnesota isn’t even talking about decentralizing its big production facilities which require transporting fuel to nuclear or coal-fired plants and then transporting electricity out in an overhead network of power lines which leak carcinogenic electro-magnetic energy waves. Of course it takes power to send power: more transportation, more leakage.
According to the American Cancer Society half the men in America will develop cancer in their lifetimes, one in four will die of cancer. For American women, one in three will get cancer and one in five will die of cancer. Minnesota legislators are considering tripling the amount of high-level radioactive waste now stored in casks, above ground on Prairie Island.

Prairie Island is a sandbar island in the Mississippi River formed by silt dropped out of the fast-flowing St. Croix River on the east and the Vermillion River on the west as they meet the slower Mississippi. Currently, 17 casks of nuclear material sit outside, about 600 yards from the Prairie Island Dakota Indian reservation. Protection at the site includes fencing, cameras, guards, and, for the casks, a 15-foot dirt hump (earthen berm) topped by sharp rocks open to the sky. There is a single road on and off the island. Nuclear workers could be transported via helicopter; that was the plan during the big flood of 1993 when the river rolled up to the plant door. The Native American community has asked for, but not received, funding for a tribal health study to determine any effects of being the closest community in the United States to a nuclear power plant.

Used nuclear fuel rods arrive at the casks after four to six years in a reactor, when they lose their efficiency, and after about ten years in an indoor pool with Mississippi River water constantly flushed through for cooling. At more than 600 degrees Fahrenheit the rods are transferred from the cooling pool outside to sealed storage casks, which are licensed for 20 years. These steel casks, weighing 122 tons, sit on an island on landfill with irradiated waste, which must be isolated from the ecosystem for 240,000 years. Since 1982 there have been two 100-year floods and one 500-year flood, high water that statistically should happen only once every 100 or 500 years. The casks can be relicensed one time but there is no practical or even theoretical way to unload the waste into some other containment system.

Expanded dry cask storage is necessary if Xcel plans to relicense its three aging reactors in Minnesota for 20 years past the current 2013 and 2014 deadlines for the Prairie Island and Monticello plants. The federal waste facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is way behind schedule, and if it ever opens, will not be large enough to accommodate the 45,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from the country’s 103 commercial reactors. That leaves Minnesota with some or most of our own nuclear waste to store indefinitely or permanently. Nuclear waste can also be reprocessed into bomb grade plutonium and uranium.

A terrorist attack on Prairie Island’s cask pad is the subject of Jerry Leppart’s suspense novel “Headwaters” (Galde Press, 1998). Actually the most vulnerable part of the plant is the cooling pool, a corrugated steel shed situated along the railroad tracks between the twin reactors. Prairie Island Dakota anti-nuclear activist Joe Campbell calls the structure “a pole barn” open to attack from various locations by a single person without ever trespassing on plant property.

SMART MOVE

According to George Crocker, nuclear expert with the North American Water Office, there are two processes that should be followed to protect Prairie Island’s plants as well as possible, and to ensure a continuing supply of electricity. First, potential targets should be bomb-proofed by structural “hardening”: that includes (in order of importance) the cooling pool, the control room, the casks, and the reactor containment structures. Second, the state should stop producing more radioactive waste by transitioning to a program of natural gas and wind power.
In fact, Xcel representatives have told state legislators they could replace Prairie Island with gas and coal. Crocker’s “Smart Move” would retire Reactor No. 1, which is riddled with cracks, and build a gas-fired replacement plant on-site using the existing transmission lines. In a 7-10 year transition window Crocker would accelerate Xcel/NSP’s extremely successful wind power program while continuing to run Reactor No. 2 until the fuel pool is full, or until the license expires. Conservation and alternatives could also make relicensing Monticello moot—if the legislature wants Minnesota nuclear-free.

There is no such thing as “the peaceful atom.” There is no safe place on earth to store irradiated waste. Nuclear power is a slow motion bomb, a kind of terrorism we are doing to ourselves. In 1994 the state decided to phase out this carcinogen in our midst but allow above-ground waste storage on the island. Eight hundred people demonstrated at the front gates of the Prairie Island plant, and a small group got arrested in a symbolic, nonviolent step-over-the-line action. At their trial in nearby Red Wing, the all-white jury pool of 26 people had 28 cases of cancer in their families.

Nuclear power and coal are antique, dirty technologies. Of the $10 million Minnesotans spend on power, $9 million leave the state. Conservation, wind and biomass can move Minnesota toward a clean, decentralized energy-independent future.