8/30/2023 0 Comments Xcel energy nuclear power plants"What we want to do is cut that pipe out and do a full root cause analysis," Clark said. Once the Monticello plant is shut down completely and the nuclear reactor cooled off, Xcel will remove the pipe and conduct several tests on it. "Within the last couple of days, we realized the catchment was no longer capturing the water," he said.Įdwin Lyman, director of nuclear safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Xcel "tried a quick patch and it failed." Essentially the company put a container beneath the pipe to catch the leaking water and send it back into the plant's water processing system.īut the leak was severe enough to cause the container to overflow, Clark said, leading to more tritium-laced water seeping into the ground. Xcel remedied the leak about a month after detecting it. There is only a half-inch space between the buildings-making the leak hard to detect, Xcel officials have said. The company then discovered that a 3-inch pipe between the plant's reactor and turbine buildings had been leaking. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in November. Xcel reported high groundwater levels of tritium to the U.S. The tritium leak has not moved beyond Xcel's property or into the Mississippi River, he said, which the MPCA confirmed. "Our other plants can fill in pretty easily for Monticello coming offline," he said.Ĭlark reiterated that neither the original leak nor the new one pose a threat to the environment or drinking water. However, the shutdown is occurring during a "shoulder season" when power demand is relatively low, Clark said. The Monticello plant runs 24 hours a day and plays a critical role in Xcel's electricity production. The plant may not be reopened before the 25-day planned outage, when the reactor's nuclear fuel is replaced. "We want to put this behind us," Clark said. The company wanted to resolve the leak immediately rather than wait for a scheduled April 15 plant shutdown for refueling. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, or MPCA, confirmed it did not ask for the plant to be shut down. "We could have continued to operate the plant safely," he said. The company is voluntarily shutting down the plant the action wasn't forced by state or federal regulators, Clark said. Tritium is a moderately radioactive form of hydrogen created in nuclear power production. The new leak was in the "hundreds of gallons," according to Xcel, far smaller than the initial leak of about 400,000 gallons. Groundwater well testing at the plant Wednesday indicated that a tritium leak into groundwater, first reported last week, had restarted, Christopher Clark, Xcel's Minnesota president, told reporters Friday at the Monticello Community Center. Chris Clark, president of Xcel Energy–Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, said the new leak also posed no risk to the public or the environment.Xcel officials said they plan to do a full analysis of why the pipe sprang a leak once the utility completes the shutdown, which will take a couple of days. Last week, the new leak was found coming from a temporary repair to the original leak, the company said. It emits a weak form of beta radiation that does not travel far and cannot penetrate human skin, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Tritium occurs naturally in the environment and is a common by-product of nuclear plant operations. Xcel Energy officials and state regulators have said the water remained on the plant’s site and did not reach the Mississippi River. There was a monthslong delay in announcing the initial leak that raised questions about public safety and transparency, but industry experts said there was never a public health threat. In November, a leak was discovered that allowed 400,000 gallons (1.5 million liters) of water containing tritium to spill. The plant will return to service “in the next week,” Keith said, but will temporarily close in mid-April for an annual maintenance project. “The pipe was confirmed as the only source of the leak.” “Crews have already repaired the leak, which did not pose any risks to public health, safety, or the environment,” Keith said in an email. Saturday to fix the leaky pipe discovered last week, Xcel Energy spokesman Theo Keith said. The nuclear plant, about 38 miles (60 kilometers) northwest of Minneapolis, was fully powered down around 7 a.m. Meanwhile, a state agency said a fish kill that claimed at least 230 fish in the Mississippi River near Xcel Energy’s Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant was caused by a water temperature change resulting from the shutdown of the plant, not by any chemicals leaking into the river. (AP) - A faulty pipe that allowed water containing a radioactive isotope of hydrogen to leak at a Minnesota nuclear power plant has been repaired and the plant will return to service in the next week, a spokesman for the energy company said Tuesday.
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