NUCLEAR SAFETY ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Organized in response to a request by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (PCA), the committee was charged with assessing the design and operational safety of Minnesota's Monticello and Prairie Island nuclear power plants. The request was made due to the March 28, 1979 nuclear reactor incident at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which resulted in a mass evacuation of the area and the permanent shut-down of the reactor. Due to a reactor overheat, radioactive gasses and water were released into the air and nearby river and a tension filled week was spent attempting to prevent a full core meltdown.

Before the committee could actually meet, however, another incident occurred; on October 2, a steam generator at the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant in Red Wing ruptured and a very small amount of radioactive gas was released. The committee quickly commenced meeting, holding its first meeting on October 15 and shortly thereafter hiring the firm of MHB Technical Associates to prepare an assessment plan. The committee continued meeting through September 1980 and presented its final report to the Governor in October 1980. The report recommended that a third party, not Northern States Power (NSP), which operated the facilities, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), assess the accident probability, accident consequence, and safety assurance effectiveness of the two plants, that a citizens' review committee oversee the completion of the assessment, and that the state's Emergency Response Plan be revised and publicized. The report was then sent to the PCA for analysis and development.

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Availability:

The collection is open for research use.

Preferred Citation:

[Indicate the cited item and/or series here]. Minnesota. Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee. Records. Minnesota Historical Society.

See the Chicago Manual of Style for additional examples.

Accession Information:

Accession number: 999-99

Location of Master Files:

Digital master of the audio reel is maintained on the Society's secure digital collections storage servers and is managed and preserved in accordance with archival best practices.

The original audio reel was disposed after the material was digitally reformatted into a wav file.

Processing Information:

Processed by: Angela Goertz, April 1999

Digitization and encoding by April Rodriguez, December 14, 2023.

Digital audio transferred from the master audio reel by the Minnesota Historical Society for preservation purposes (December 2023).

Digitization was made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on November 4, 2008.

Catalog ID number: 990017364520104294

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Further records related to this committee can be found in the Pollution Control Agency: Nuclear Committee folder of the Gary Botzek files (cataloged separately as part of the records of Governor Albert Quie).

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This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.

Topics:

Nuclear power plants -- Accidents -- Minnesota.

Nuclear power plants -- Environmental aspects -- Minnesota.

Nuclear power plants -- Risk assessment -- Minnesota.

Organizations:

MHB Technical Associates (San Jose, Calif.)

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

Minnesota. Governor (1979-1983 : Quie).

Monticello Nuclear Power Generating Plant (Minn.)

Northern States Power Company (Minnesota)

Prairie Island Nuclear Plant

Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant (Pa.)

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

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