The Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant is an

electricity Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter possessing an electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwel ...

-generating facility located in

Red Wing, Minnesota Red Wing is a city in and the county seat of Goodhue County, Minnesota, United States, along the upper Mississippi River. The population was 16,547 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. It is part of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropo ...

, along the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...

, and adjacent to the

Prairie Island Indian Community Prairie Island Indian Community ( Dakota: ''Tinta Winta'') is a Mdewakanton Sioux Indian Reservation The reservation was established in 1889, with boundaries modified after that time. The federally recognized tribe has lost much reservation land ...

reservation __NOTOC__ Reservation may refer to: Places Types of places: * Indian reservation, in the United States * Military base, often called reservations * Nature reserve Government and law * Reservation (law), a caveat to a treaty * Reservation in India, ...

. The

nuclear power plant A nuclear power plant (NPP), also known as a nuclear power station (NPS), nuclear generating station (NGS) or atomic power station (APS) is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor. As is typical of thermal power st ...

, which began operating in 1973, has two

nuclear reactor A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a Nuclear fission, fission nuclear chain reaction. They are used for Nuclear power, commercial electricity, nuclear marine propulsion, marine propulsion, Weapons-grade plutonium, weapons ...

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, India and Canada). In a PWR, water is used both as ...

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

megawatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of Power (physics), 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 quantification (science), quantify the rate of Work ...

s of power. Units 1 and 2 are licensed by the

Nuclear Regulatory Commission The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is an independent agency of the United States government tasked with protecting public health and safety related to nuclear energy. Established by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, the ...

(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 a U.S. regulated electric utility and natural gas delivery company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, serving more than 3.7 million electric customers and 2.1 million natural gas customers across parts of eight states (Color ...

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

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

(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 Electri ...

Monticello Monticello ( ) was the primary residence and plantation of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the third president of the United States. Jefferson began designing Monticello after inheriting l ...

). 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. It is a result of many activities, including nuclear medicine, nuclear research, nuclear power generation, nuclear decommissioning, rare-earth mining, and nuclear ...

in large

steel Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that demonstrates improved mechanical properties compared to the pure form of iron. Due to steel's high Young's modulus, elastic modulus, Yield (engineering), yield strength, Fracture, fracture strength a ...

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 ...

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. Floodplains stretch from the banks of a river channel to the base of the enclosing valley, and experience flooding during periods of high Discharge (hydrolog ...

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.

(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

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 is an American cable news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Launched on July 15, 1996, and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the channel primarily broadcasts r ...

. 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 of America (U.S. federal government or U.S. government) is the Federation#Federal governments, national government of the United States. The U.S. federal government is composed of three distinct ...

, 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 radioact ...

is under construction, but given strong opposition in the region, the

Obama administration Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, took office following his victory over Republican nomine ...

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 (MPUC) is an independent regulatory agency within the U.S. state of Minnesota responsible for the oversight and regulation of public utilities, including electric, natural gas, and telecommunications servi ...

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

environmentalist Environmentalism is a broad Philosophy of life, philosophy, ideology, and social movement about supporting life, habitats, and surroundings. While environmentalism focuses more on the environmental and nature-related aspects of Green politics, g ...

s and the neighboring Prairie Island tribe led the

Minnesota Legislature The Minnesota Legislature is the bicameral legislature of the U.S. state of Minnesota consisting of two houses: the Senate and the House of Representatives. Senators are elected from 67 single-member districts. In order to account for decenn ...

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 Renewable energy (also called green energy) is energy made from renewable resource, renewable natural resources that are replenished on a human lifetime, human timescale. The most widely used renewable energy types are solar energy, wind pow ...

in generating power, such as

wind power Wind power is the use of wind energy to generate useful work. Historically, wind power was used by sails, windmills and windpumps, but today it is mostly used to generate electricity. This article deals only with wind power for electricity ge ...

. 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".

Hydrogen production

Prairie Island will start producing

green hydrogen Green hydrogen (GH2 or GH2) is hydrogen produced by the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity. Production of green hydrogen causes significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions than production of grey hydrogen, which is derived fr ...

from

high-temperature electrolysis High-temperature electrolysis (also HTE or steam electrolysis, or HTSE) is a technology for producing hydrogen from water at high temperatures or other products, such as iron or carbon nanomaterials, as higher energy lowers needed electricity to ...

is going to build two natural gas power plants that can use a mix of 30% hydrogen. Natural gas power plants could be replaced/retrofitted with

combined cycle hydrogen power plant A combined cycle power plant is an assembly of heat engines that work in tandem from the same source of heat, converting it into mechanical energy. On land, when used to make electricity the most common type is called a combined cycle gas turb ...

s to transition away from hydrocarbons.

Ships A ship is a large vessel that travels the world's oceans and other navigable waterways, carrying cargo or passengers, or in support of specialized missions, such as defense, research and fishing. Ships are generally distinguished from boats, ...

and

trains A train (from Old French , from Latin">-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ... , from Latin , "to pull, to draw") is a series of connected vehicles th ...

could also run on

hydrogen fuel cells A fuel cell is an electrochemical cell that converts the chemical energy of a fuel (often hydrogen) and an oxidizing agent (often oxygen) into electricity through a pair of redox reactions. Fuel cells are different from most batteries in requ ...

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