Xcel Energy this week finished replacing leaky pipes at the Monticello Nuclear Generating Plant in Minnesota, which had shut down to deal with the leaks, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson said Thursday.
The commission sent three inspectors to Monticello, about 50 miles northwest by road from Minneapolis near the Mississippi River, to witness “critical steps of pipe removal and installation” a spokesperson wrote in an email to RadWaste Monitor.
Xcel Energy shut down the plant on Saturday after water containing tritium leaked into the groundwater at the plant. The company had been assessing a similar leak at Monticello since November and, until another leak cropped up last week, had planned to repair the damaged plumbing during a scheduled outage in April.
Meanwhile, “the amount of leakage is still being quantified,” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said in a notice posted online Monday. “Monitoring of groundwater wells has not identified any tritium outside the Monticello station boundaries.”
On March 21, Xcel said in a press release that “monitoring equipment at the plant Wednesday indicated a small amount of new water from the original leak had reached the groundwater.”
