The Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant is an

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as describ ...

-generating facility located in

Red Wing, Minnesota Red Wing is a city in Goodhue County, Minnesota, United States, along the upper Mississippi River. The population was 16,547 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Goodhue County. This city is named for early 19th-century Dakota Sioux c ...

, along the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it fl ...

, and adjacent to the

Prairie Island Indian Community Prairie Island Indian Community (Dakota: ''Tinta Winta'') is a Mdewakanton Sioux Indian reservation in Goodhue County, Minnesota, along the Mississippi River. Most of the reservation now lies within the city of Red Wing, which developed after th ...

reservation. The nuclear power plant, which began operating in 1973, has two

nuclear reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat fr ...

s (

pressurized water reactor A pressurized water reactor (PWR) is a type of light-water nuclear reactor. PWRs constitute the large majority of the world's nuclear power plants (with notable exceptions being the UK, Japan and Canada). In a PWR, the primary coolant (water) i ...

s) manufactured by Westinghouse that produce a total 1,076

megawatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James ...

s of power. Units 1 and 2 are licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to operate through 2033 and 2034, respectively. The plant is owned by Northern States Power Company (NSP), a subsidiary of

Xcel Energy Xcel Energy Inc. is an American utility holding company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, serving more than 3.7 million electric customers and 2.1 million natural gas customers in Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico in 2019. It consists of four ope ...

, and is operated by Xcel Energy. Prairie Island is one of two nuclear power plants in

Minnesota Minnesota () is a state in the upper midwestern region of the United States. It is the 12th largest U.S. state in area and the 22nd most populous, with over 5.75 million residents. Minnesota is home to western prairies, now given over to ...

(the other being

Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant The Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant is a nuclear power plant located in Monticello, Minnesota, along the Mississippi River. The site, which began operating in 1971, has a single nuclear reactor (boiling water reactor) of the General Electr ...

Monticello Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, V ...

). Prairie Island has attracted controversy in the early 21st century for its operator

's decision to store

nuclear waste Radioactive waste is a type of hazardous waste that contains radioactive material. Radioactive waste is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, rare-earth mining, and nuclear weapons ...

in large steel

cask A barrel or cask is a hollow cylindrical container with a bulging center, longer than it is wide. They are traditionally made of wooden staves and bound by wooden or metal hoops. The word vat is often used for large containers for liquids, u ...

s on-site. As this area is a

floodplain A floodplain or flood plain or bottomlands is an area of land adjacent to a river which stretches from the banks of its channel to the base of the enclosing valley walls, and which experiences flooding during periods of high discharge.Goudi ...

of the Mississippi, many opponents of the decision fear the risk of water contamination through breach of the casks during seasonal flooding of this important river. They opposed renewal of the federal license at the Prairie Island facility. In April 2008, Xcel requested that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) renew the licenses of both reactors, extending them for an additional twenty years. The license renewals were approved in June 2011. The company has also requested NRC approval to use a similar storage system at its Monticello plant, which is currently licensed through 2030. In May 2006 repair workers at the plant were exposed to very low levels of radiation due to inhalation of radioactive

iodine-131 Iodine-131 (131I, I-131) is an important radioisotope of iodine discovered by Glenn Seaborg and John Livingood in 1938 at the University of California, Berkeley. It has a radioactive decay half-life of about eight days. It is associated with nu ...

(¹³¹I) gas. The gas leaked from the steam generators, which were opened for inspection. ¹³¹I gas is normally removed by means of a carbon-based filter; in this case the filter had developed a small leak. The NRC deemed this event to be of very low safety significance. It said that no overdose of radiation resulted in any of the workers. The winter net electrical generation is 560 MW (Unit 1) and 554 MW (Unit 2). The gross electrical generation for both units is 592 MW.

Electricity Production

Surrounding population

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission defines two emergency planning zones around nuclear power plants: a plume exposure pathway zone has a radius of , and is related primarily to exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination. Secondly, an ingestion pathway zone with a radius of about , is concerned primarily with ingestion of food and liquid by residents that could be contaminated by radioactivity. The 2010 U.S. population within of Prairie Island was 27,996, an increase of 4.6 percent in a decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data for

MSNBC MSNBC (originally the Microsoft National Broadcasting Company) is an American news-based pay television cable channel. It is owned by NBCUniversala subsidiary of Comcast. Headquartered in New York City, it provides news coverage and politi ...

. The 2010 U.S. population within was 2,945,237, an increase of 7.8 percent since 2000. Cities within 50 miles include Minneapolis (39 miles to city center) and St. Paul (32 miles to city center).

Spent fuel storage

NSP had initially intended to send radioactive waste from this plant to a storage facility operated by the

United States federal government The federal government of the United States (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the national government of the United States, a federal republic located primarily in North America, composed of 50 states, a city within a fe ...

, but no such site is yet open for use. (The

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is a proposed deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radio ...

is under construction, but given strong opposition in the region, the Obama Administration no longer thought this was an option.) In 1991, Xcel Energy had requested permission from the

Minnesota Public Utilities Commission The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is the consumer protection agency in the U.S. state of Minnesota charged with the regulation of public utilities such as electric Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated wi ...

to eventually store waste in 48 dry casks on the Prairie Island site. Opposition by

environmentalist An environmentalist is a person who is concerned with and/or advocates for the protection of the environment. An environmentalist can be considered a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that se ...

s and the neighboring Prairie Island tribe led the Minnesota Legislature to decrease the number of allowed casks to 17; this was sufficient to keep the plant operating through approximately 2003. When those casks filled, Xcel Energy requested that the limit be expanded beyond 17 casks. The legislature granted the request, but required the company to make greater use of renewable energy in generating power, such as

wind power Wind power or wind energy is mostly the use of wind turbines to generate electricity. Wind power is a popular, sustainable, renewable energy source that has a much smaller impact on the environment than burning fossil fuels. Historically ...

. In addition, it was required to pay the adjacent

up to $2.25 million per year to help with evacuation improvements, and the acquisition and development of new land for their reservation. In addition, this money was to help pay for a health study and emergency management activities by the small tribe.

Steam generator replacement

Operators at Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant began a refueling outage on Unit 2 at 12:01 a.m. 9/23/2013. In addition to refueling the reactor, an expanded workforce replaced the unit's two steam generators. Unit 2 was expected to come back online within eight weeks; however, it did not resume operation until January 13, 2014. At 2 AM on January 14, Unit 2 reached 100% power output.

Seismic risk

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's estimate of the risk each year of an earthquake intense enough to cause core damage to the reactor at Prairie Island was 1 in 333,333, according to an NRC study published in August 2010.

Emergency shutdowns

Xcel Energy performed an emergency shutdown in late January 2015 of the Unit 1 reactor after a cloud of steam built up in the pressurized cooling system following a cooling-down process to replace a seal in one of the reactor cooling pumps. The plant returned to full power in February 2015. Unit 2 of the plant has been shut down due to an emergency on 5 March 2015, indicated by a fire alarm at 4:00 am CST. Xcel energy plant operators declared a “notification of an unusual event,” the lowest of four emergency classifications established by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Unit 2 shut down automatically December 17, 2015, due to a turbine problem, and the fire alarm went off at the time. Operators declared a "notification of unusual event".
The Public

References

External links

* * *
Prairie Island Coalition
– a group opposing the storage of reactor waste
Minnesota Legislative Reference Library: Prairie Island Nuclear Waste Storage
{{U.S. Nuclear Plants Energy infrastructure completed in 1973 Energy infrastructure completed in 1974 Buildings and structures in Goodhue County, Minnesota Nuclear power plants in Minnesota Nuclear power stations using pressurized water reactors Xcel Energy Red Wing, Minnesota