Nuclear Racism Commission strikes again

NRC's file photo of the twin reactor Prairie Island nuclear power plantMake that 68 for 68: as the Associated Press reports, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has rubberstamped another two 20 year license extensions, this time at Prairie Island Units 1 and 2 in Minnesota. NRC did so by slapping the Mdewekanton Dakota "Prairie Island Indian Community" in the face, approving the relicensing against their wishes. But then, Northern States Power built the twin-reactor complex on the island's reservation in the first place without the community's informed consent several decades ago, misleadingly telling the tribe it would be a "steam generating plant," but not mentioning the nuclear part. Since, the reactors have leaked tritium into groundwater. High-level radioactive waste dry cask storage has been built within 600 yards of the tribe's child care center. A "cask dangle" in the mid-1990s risked a high-level radioactive waste storage pool catastrophe. And now the company, renamed Xcel, will apply for a power uprate to run the reactors harder and hotter. Never mind that the site has suffered a number of serious floods in the past decade or two, and that there is only a single emergency evacuation route off the island, which itself is sometimes under water.

NSP/Xcel has also led the effort to open a parking lot dump for 40,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste on the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah, making it perhaps the single most environmentally racist nuclear utility in the U.S. NRC approved the license for "Private Fuel Storage LLC" in 2006, but the creation of a federal wilderness area around the Goshute reservation has thus far blocked the railway needed to deliver the deadly cargo.