Legalectric

Aaaaah, yes, life in a company town. Not long after I moved here, I listened to the local radio station, and NSP was holding an event in one of the parks here, and they billed it as “a nuke house event for the whole family.” Really! They had a 10 or more foot Reddy Kilowatt, damn, I want one of those… and would you believe Tom Micheletti is CEO of Reddy Kilowatt corporation?

Anyway, a little Beagle told me that there was a radiation release at Prairie Island:

Nuclear plant workers exposed to radioactive gas

Anne Jacobson
Red Wing Republican Eagle
Published Tuesday, May 09, 2006

About a dozen workers at the Prairie Island nuclear plant were exposed to low levels of radiation last week, Nuclear Management Co. said Tuesday.

Some radioactive gas leaked into a containment building May 5 while workers were opening a steam generator in Unit 1. The procedure is part of normal maintenance during a refueling outage.

The plant evacuated about a hundred people as a safety precaution, Site Vice President Tom Palmisano said. About 12 people were exposed to low-level radiation equivalent to a dental X-ray. The workers, who were wearing protective suits, were cleaned up and sent home.

“We monitor for this. We know it can occur, so we spotted it very quickly. We had the workers exit the building,” he said. “Nobody was contaminated.”

The plant began a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage of Unit 1 on April 28.

The unit’s steam generators, which operate under about 2,000 pounds of pressure, were allowed to cool and depressurize. Some radioactive gas emits whenever a generator opens, he explained. Normally the gas is routed to a filtering and cleaning system, but the ventilator wasn’t working effectively or was slightly misaligned so a small amount of gas built up in the containment building.

No radioactivity was released the outdoors, said Jan Strasma, spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

After checking the hundred workers, Nuclear Management had the building’s air purified. Within 12 hours maintenance crews were back at work.

“We’re very conservative. We take the protection of our workers very seriously,” Palmisano said.

Exposure was between 10 to 15 millirems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission limits a worker’s exposure to is 5,000 millirems of radiation in a year. Prairie Island’s internal limit is 2,000.

“What made this undesirable is that this was 10 millirems we were not expecting to get,” Palmisano said.

Nuclear Management Co. operates the plant for Xcel Energy and refuels each reactor about every 18 months. This outage will take several weeks and includes replacing the reactor’s vessel head, which represents a $25 million investment in the plant.

Prairie Island Unit 2â??s vessel head was replaced last year. Unit 2 continues operate during the Unit 1 outage and will be refueled this fall.

And in the STrib:

100 Prairie Island workers exposed to low radiation

100 repair workers inhaled radioactive gas for a short time last week at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing. Repair workers breathed radioactive gas for a short time last week at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing.

Tom Meersman, Star Tribune

Last update: May 09, 2006 â?? 9:40 PM

About 100 workers at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Red Wing, Minn., were accidentally exposed to low levels of radiation last week, federal officials confirmed Tuesday. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the incident occurred on May 5, about a week after the plant had been shut down for scheduled maintenance and refueling.

There was no release of radioactivity to the outdoors, said Jan Strasma, spokesman for the commission, and the workers received about as much radiation as is contained in a single X-ray. “The exposure was small and did not have any health and safety consequences, ” Strasma said.

The workers left the area immediately, he said, and they were decontaminated before being allowed to go home.

Vince Guertin, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 949, said that he had no comment on the incident because he had not seen any report about it. The local represents many workers at the plant.

Arline Datu, spokeswoman for Nuclear Management Company, which operates Xcel Energy’s nuclear plants, said the workers were exposed after they entered the innermost portion of the nuclear plant called the containment area. It is sealed while a nuclear plant is operating, but is opened when the plant is inactive so that workers can access the reactor and other equipment for inspection, repair and refueling.

Datu said that radioactive iodine gas was inadvertently released onto the workers and inhaled when they opened “manways” into the steam generators. The radioactive iodine was in the air, she said, because of a tiny leak in one of the reactor’s many radioactive fuel assemblies.

Exposure to high levels of radioactive iodine, called iodine-131, can cause thyroid cancer and related problems.

Strasma said that the radioactive gas, even at very low levels, should have been removed by a carbon-based air filtration system before the workers entered the containment area, but for some reason that did not happen. “Our inspectors will be looking at this further,” he said.

Strasma said that Prairie Island has no history of similar problems, but that it’s not unusual to have relatively minor contamination during maintenance at nuclear plants. However, he said that Prairie Island was different in one respect: “The fact that 100 workers were exposed was a high number,” Strasma said.

Datu said that the radioactive iodine gas was cleared from the plant within 12 hours, and that the maintenance and other repair work has resumed. Utilities do not disclose how long repairs may take for competitive reasons, she said.

p.s. A little Beagle also told me that that the reactor is down from April 28 – June 1, 2006.

Someone told me they might be osprey nests up there on Hwy. 10 — check these out — could be!

From Moundsview Schools, which aer participating in the Twin Cities Osprey Project.

I know it was a problem with the short lattice structures used for wind turbines in the old days, but when I was going up Co. Rd. 10 in Itasca, I saw two eagle nests in the H-frames along the road. One was small, but one was pretty hefty. TRANSMISSION? (next time I’ll bring my camera — maybe there will be chicks?)

Utility workers destroying Monk Parakeet nest
from Invasive Species Weblog

Then, when I’m trying to find another editorial about Dick Day’s putting his wife and Tom Neuville’s son on the payroll and failure to document state and federal withholding in Campaign Finance reports, I see this article in the Mankato paper today: “Texas utility tries to foil parakeet nests,” and so I dug a bit… It’s not just eagles on transmission towers, it’s monk parakeets too. Don’t be suprised if you think the birds are perching on your shoulder, some of these sites have great birdcalls. Krie agrees!

Here’s the best: Florida Monk Parakeet Nesting Substrates

The eagles nest looked like this but one was four or five times this size!

Next time you’re headed up Co. Rd. 10, going north from Warba, check out the eagle nests! Yeah, that goes for you, too, all you Excelsior folks!

In today’s Grand Rapids Herald-Review

Excelsior plans change retirement plans

Editor:

As someone who grew up in the Grand Rapids-Bovey area, I started checking out real estate in that area, thinking about a retirement home. Thatâ??s when I found out that there is a power company that wants to come into the area, too. So I went on the Internet to see what I could find out about these Excelsior guys. Some sectors of the economy still have not recovered from the Enron debacle so, to me, the average person has to be on the alert.

It would seem that we, taxpayers, have guaranteed a federal loan for them to go into a power generation process. That is not very reassuring when you look at the overall, dismal performance history of the merchant power industry. I cannot find any document that says they even have a guaranteed customer base. Purely speculative.
The loan they will be using does not require them to bring jobs into the region (something that Excelsior itself told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune back in October of 2003), so there is nothing to hold their feet to the fire on that one. In fact, the one solid figure for that, that I could find, is that at last count 16 Excelsior lobbyists are registered in Minnesota.

It can make us sick at heart to learn how third world countries have traded their environment and quality of life for a few jobs. It is hard to believe that people I grew up with right here in this country are willing to let Excelsior have so much for so little (they are even getting tax breaks?) and turn that beautiful countryside into its own third world country!

It was shocking to learn about the mercury levels that will be in the water coming up out of these old mine pits. Mercury is especially harmful to the developing neural system in children, and just because they speak of it in terms of nanograms, I sure would not want my grandchildren living where anything harmful is in the air or polluting the streams.

If I am reading the information correctly, there is going to be a grid of power lines and pipelines criss-crossing a large section of land. Not only would that be ugly, there are inconveniences and dangers associated with both power lines and pipelines. Cancers have been linked to living under power lines and explosions and fires have been the result of pipelines.

The bottom line for me is that I will look elsewhere for a retirement home. I cannot tell you how unbelievably sad it is to read about all this, to learn that a dream of pristine land is only that â?? a dream. Perhaps there should be a contingency attached to Excelsiorâ??s presence: make the CEO and other upper management live south (downwind) of the new plant no further away than five miles and for no fewer than five years. Ask them if they would be willing to do that.

Margaret Kelly
Tacoma, Wash

I noted in the WCCO Energy series, a Reality Check item, Energy Lobbying at the Capitol, that they reported on Great River Energy’s 7 lobbyists working for big powerful companies, but they didn’t mention that Excelsior has 16! So I checked the Campaign Finance Board site (and by the way, Ron Dicklich is a lobbyist for Great River Energy — the guy who said Utility Personal Property Tax had been repealed!. Obviously they don’t have NCLB for lobbyists)

Excelsior Energy
Identification Number: 5288

This report includes filings through 1:05 am, May. 4, 2006.

Crescent Ridge Corp Center, Ste 305
11100 Wayzata Blvd
Minnetonka, MN 55305

Lobbyists Registered;Registration Number Registration Date
James J Bertrand 8432 12/17/2004
Judy E Cook 6040 2/3/2003
Robert S Evans 1523 2/14/2005
James L Girard 4017 2/3/2003
Christopher Greenman 1674 2/9/2006
Todd A Hill 88 2/3/2003
Douglas J Johnson 1255 2/14/2005
Julie Jorgensen 865 11/30/2001
Andrea Kajer 8665 1/24/2005
Timothy M Kelley 1445 12/17/2004
Brian M Meloy 4067 12/17/2004
Patrick Micheletti 1557 4/25/2005
Thomas A Micheletti 7701 11/30/2001
Thomas L Osteraas 1673 2/9/2006
Byron E Starns 5636 12/17/2004
Michael Wadley 1480 1/18/2005

Looks to me like we have to extend an apology to Excelsior — they aren’t lying — they ARE creating jobs, jobs, jobs jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs!!!

Age – wax on wood, Italy, circa late 1600’s

… yeah, this goes in the “energy” category, but it’s really “lack thereof.” Since I’ve been sick, and have three more weeks of drugs, well, thankfully I no longer feel like something the dog urped up, but oh, it’s slow going, yesterday getting up north, being “on” in Grand Rapids and then getting back this morning… it’s not just that the pups snouts are both turning noticibly grey, what’s worse is that I’ve got to admit that I can’t drive all night anymore, can’t write on no sleep either, and so there I was in the grocery store, barely able to haul my carcass in there after 250+ miles, got rung up and I’d handed over nearly exact change, and got back more than I’d expected. HUH? She pointed at the sign, “Senior Discount.” It’s Senior Day at the store, 55 and over. My first “Senior” discount. I’ll fight that another day, today I felt twice that! Send that one to Jeremy Iggers!