Seven Hundred Yards Pt. 1: A Small Island in the Mississippi — Episode 210 of Local Energy Rules

Michael Childs, Jr.:
We are the closest community, closest community. I’m not just talking Native– any community in the United States to an operating nuclear plant and that storage of spent nuclear fuel.

John Farrell:
The community in question is Prairie Island Indian Community, a federally recognized Tribe, which is located on an island in the Mississippi River, also known as Ȟaȟá Wakpá or Wakpá Tháŋka in the Dakota language. Today, Prairie Island Indian Community has more than 1000 enrolled members. As descendants of the Bdewakaŋtuŋwaŋ band of Eastern Dakota, their history on Prairie Island goes back many generations, but in the past 50 years, the community has had to contend with a new interloper to their lands, the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, which lies fewer than 700 yards away. Prairie Island Indian Community does not own the nuclear plant. They don’t even receive electricity from it. Instead, Xcel Energy, Minnesota’s largest utility, owns the 1100 megawatt nuclear plant, using it to generate power for customers elsewhere in the state. Though the power leaves the community, the nuclear waste remains on Prairie Island, stored above ground in large metal containers that tower over any person standing nearby.

How the Prairie Island Indian Community was made to share Prairie Island with a nuclear plant and spent nuclear fuel is a story of broken promises and environmental injustice, but it is also a story of community resistance and resilience. This three episode series traces that story, examining how powerful players, from the electric utility to state and federal policy makers, sited the plant and its waste right next door to Prairie Island Indian Community, and also how Tribal members and their allies have stood up for their rights — in the process, growing a clean energy future for the community and Minnesota as a whole. In this first episode, we take a look at the early history of Prairie Island Indian Community and the construction of the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant, setting the stage for future fights over onsite storage of spent nuclear fuel and the community’s renewable energy goals. Before we begin, please be aware that this episode mentions events related to the United States genocide and killing of Indigenous peoples. I’m John Ferrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is episode one in our three-part series, Seven Hundred Yards: How a Native Nation resisted the Nuclear Plant next door. It’s a production of Local Energy Rules, a biweekly podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system.

The voice you heard at the start of this episode belongs to Prairie Island Indian Community Council member Michael Childs Jr. His earliest recollections of Prairie Island include the nuclear plant.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
I was born in Minneapolis, lived there till I was about 10, and then we moved to Prairie Island and I mean you can’t miss the plant. Even though I didn’t live down here until I was 10. We visited Prairie Island almost weekly on the weekends, so I mean it’s been there ever since I can remember. I was about five when… You know, I was born in 1968, so ’73-’74, I was like five-six years old, so all my memories have included the plant.

John Farrell:
He knew relatives and other community members who worked at the nuclear generating plant, and he later ended up working there for 12 years.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
My first degree was in computer and consumer electronics back in the late eighties. That gave me an opportunity to work for Xcel Energy. The job title was instrument and control specialist, so what I did was I calibrated all the, let’s see, pressure, temperature, radiation, just about any kind of parameter you can think of, I calibrated it, but I also worked on the control systems, so everything that controlled the plant. But I also had two uncles that were senior reactor operators, so I had that connection and that’s how I kind of got into the plant. I have a lot of cousins that have worked there and I’m the last Tribal member from Prairie Island to work there.

John Farrell:
Today he’s on Prairie Island Indian Community’s Tribal Council.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
This is my third term on Tribal Council and I’m currently treasurer. I get to control the finances sometimes. I’m one of these people I love to do things, so if I’m in government, I want to be effective. That’s why I chose to run for elected position on my Tribe.

John Farrell:
Though he’s a member of the Tribal Council today, the historical trauma that Councilman Child’s family experienced damaged his and his family’s connection with their heritage when he was young. This trauma included exploitative boarding schools, which the federal government forced Native children to attend in attempt to sever their connections with their Tribes, languages, and cultural practices despite strong resistance from these children’s families and their communities.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
My grandma was a boarding school survivor, so we didn’t… in my family, my dad was told you go to school, learn stuff, get a job somewhere, and so I didn’t get a lot of the cultural stuff. I’m picking it up as I get older, but my Dakota name is matuṡka, which means crawfish, which is kind of cool because I have a connection with the water.

John Farrell:
Water surrounds Prairie Island Indian Community. Prairie Island, or Thíŋta Wíta, is bordered by the Mississippi and Vermillion Rivers and lies 40 miles southwest of Bdóte. Bdóte is a Dakota word, meaning where two waters come together. It is often used to refer specifically to the area around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, the current location of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The Dakota people have a long and rich history on Prairie Island and in Mni Sóta Makoce, or Minnesota, that predates European colonization. By the mid-1800s, the Dakota bands were party to a number of treaties with the U.S. government, but the violent removal of Dakota people from their homelands and the United States’s failure to uphold treaty terms contributed to the start of the war with the Dakota people in 1862. This uprising ended with the U.S. government hanging 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, still the largest mass execution in United States history. At the end of the war, the U.S. government also established a concentration camp at Fort Snelling for Dakota, women, children and other non-fighters, forcibly expelled many Dakota from Minnesota, and invalidated all previous treaties with the Dakota people.

Despite these atrocities, the Dakota people have fought to retain their sovereignty, resilience, and culture. Families began returning to Prairie Island in the late-1800s. Following the federal Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Prairie Island Indian Community adopted a constitution in 1936 and received formal recognition from the U.S. government.

Today, the community faces what they call the trifecta of threats. Alongside the nuclear plant, there are also railroad tracks that carry hazardous materials and cross the only road onto Prairie Island, sometimes blocking access, as well as a nearby lock and dam that has contributed to flooding. Just as Prairie Island Indian Community was passing their constitution, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was building Lock and Dam #3. Once completed in 1938, the project flooded part of the Tribe’s reservation land, including burial mounds, and it increased the flooding risk of the remaining land, a risk that remains today. Councilman Michael Childs Jr. Recounted the history when we spoke with him.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
So right after we approve our constitution, 1936, right, the Lock and Dam’s being completed, there’s all these promises of land, and some of that’s flooded. We call what we have Parcel D — that’s flooded, right? Well, they promised land and they flood it, right? And then the Lock and Dam, with climate change or whatever’s going on in the environment, we have more flooding, right, and we’ve seen flooding all the way into the fall now.

John Farrell:
The presence of the railroad also poses threats to the community.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
The railroad track is a main artery for Bakken crude, right? It’s hazardous material, very flammable. It also cuts off access to our islands. Without the lock and dam — and without the railroad — there probably wouldn’t have been a nuclear plant because you wouldn’t have sited a plant there without a railroad or water source, right?

John Farrell:
Xcel Energy, which was then called Northern States Power or NSP, built the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant alongside the river in 1973. The project was part of a wave of new nuclear energy across the country being built to meet growing electricity demand. To learn more about this context, we called up our ILSR colleague, David Morris.

David Morris:
Sometimes I tell people that I’m so old that when I was young, the phone was attached to the wall, but I am essentially a child of the sixties in a technological and a political sense. Out of that, I started the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and the focus was on localism as a way of decentralizing production and authority and responsibility.

From about 1910 to the middle 1960s, the price of electricity dropped every year, so if you were a regulatory agency, you had had the easy job of deciding how fast they were going to drop. And the electric power plants got bigger and bigger because they had to deal with demand that was larger and larger, and by the sixties, demand was doubling every seven years, and so when you double every seven years, within 10 years, within 20 years, you have an enormous demand. And what the United States did at that point was to bet on nuclear power because nuclear power could come online, and they were immense plants. They were enormous plants. They were three and four times larger than any of the fossil fuel plants that had come before them.

In the 1960s, you had NSP apply for the right to build a nuclear plant, along with several hundred other utilities around the country, a short distance from the Tribe.

John Farrell:
When NSP began construction of the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, it didn’t consult the Tribal government next door. There wasn’t even widespread awareness that a nuclear plant, which has since become a near permanent part of the landscape was being built, despite a number of community members working on the construction project, according to Prairie Island Tribal member Tina Jefferson.

Tina Jefferson:
I’ve lived on the reservation all of my life. I took an interest in the nuclear power plant when I was 10 years old because I was having dreams about the place and I took an initiative to learn what the nuclear power plant was all about.

I was born in 1964. The plant was built in 1972. I remember many of our people going and getting jobs there to build the plant and to be there. When they first brought it into the community. They told everybody it was going to be a steam generated plant. Well, they didn’t explain how the steam was going to be heated up that it was from nuclear power. I’m not sure what everybody thought, but we were sold that it was a safe thing, that it was going to be penny-wise and that it wasn’t going to have long-term effects on anything or anybody, but that was not the case.

It started for me at a young age and it’s been something that’s just still there and it’s not going to go away. A half life is 10,000 years. That’s a long time.

John Farrell:
The construction of the nuclear plant by NSP kicked off a long period of distrust to the utility in the community, Councilman Childs recounted.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
It was placed there, one without any really request or even discussion or even asked permission, it was placed there, right? So it can be tenuous, right? Even somebody like me that worked there can be kind of tenuous sometimes because it was placed there without us.

A few years after operation starts, October 2nd, 1979, there was what they call a steam generator leak. It just happens to be that the wind — if you look at the NRC report, the wind’s blowing towards the community. I mean, they had radiation detectors and all of them out and all that stuff back then, but there was no communication.

This is where I’ve become aware because this happened.. You know, I’m 11 years old, so I’m aware. We moved to the Prairie Island by then, so we’re living down there. All the adults are totally worked up. There’s meetings all the time, but the distrust kind of happened because of the lack of communication and because of that, that has created a big fear in our members

John Farrell:
In the following years, the utilities actions continue to harm the community and compound their initial mistrust. NSP failed to notify the Tribe of a discharge leak in 1990. Later on Councilman Child said the utility obstructed efforts to return ancestral remains to the Tribe that NSP had removed without permission during the construction of the nuclear plant.

Despite bearing the risks and challenges of sharing a small island with a nuclear generating plant, Prairie Island Indian Community received limited financial benefits for many years after NSP built the plant. Notably, the utility pays its substantial tax bill to the city of Red Wing and not to the Tribal Nation, because the city, located several miles to the south, annexed the township that encompassed Prairie Island in 1971. Councilman Childs explained how this tax revenue didn’t make its way back to the local community.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
You also saw the fact that Red Wing was getting significant tax from them. From my viewpoint, Red Wing maybe spent a lot of money in their town, but even though at that time all of our reservation was within the city limits of Red Wing, the police were very slow to respond, and when they did, they weren’t responsive and it felt like a racial issue. Again, that’s my perception, right? Fire- when I worked there, one time, Red Wing fire department was the last fire department to make it there. Volunteer fire department. Miesville made it first. Hastings, which is the town north, made it second, and Red Wing made it third. It was frustrating as a Tribal member because you’d see as almost $10 million — I think it’s ready around $11 million right now, that Red Wing gets — but significant amount of money, but they didn’t seem to really ever care about us unless it was making sure that road to the plant was plowed.

John Farrell:
A second person we interviewed said they remembered another use of Red Wing’s tax windfall for the Prairie Island community, a solitary playground with a swing set and a teeter-totter.

Even with that long history of harm and disrespect that NSP and today Xcel Energy inflicted on Prairie Island Indian Community, their relationship has reportedly improved greatly in recent years.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
Xcel Energy didn’t talk to the Tribe in a respectful manner. It was kind of like, we’re going to do this and this is how we’re going to do stuff, and it’s evolved over the years, right? But there’s been a long time where there was issues. Now in the last probably 5-10 years, we’ve had some pretty good relations with Xcel.

John Farrell:
Since 2003, Xcel Energy has also made payments to the Tribal Nation in return for additional dry cask storage and in place of the tax revenue that the community doesn’t receive. In 2023, Xcel’s payments to the Tribe increased to $10 million per year from $2.5 million previously, and a fee was added for each cask of nuclear waste stored at the plant. While the payments from Xcel Energy provide a measure of compensation for the community concerns over the nuclear plant and the waste storage remain.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
I mean really it’s safety. It is about nuclear safety and all my relatives that live around here. We are the closest community, closest community. I’m not just talking Native — any community in the United States to an operating nuclear plant and that storage of spent nuclear fuel. I always say the closest person to the plant is my cousin, Tina Jefferson now, and her grandkids, and I always think about her. She is the closest, but we have a lot of people on the same road. They might not be as close as her, but they’re very close.

Tina Jefferson:
We have the railroad track going through our reservation, so that was a major concern because there were times when the railroad would, the train would be stuck on the tracks and we’d be stuck here, and what if there was an emergency? What if something happened?

Until HIPAA came around, we were trying to do health studies and we were trying to gather up information about our people to show all the different range of diseases that our people have had. Without a health study, without all that other stuff in place, we were never able to prove anything that it was hurting our people.

There has been a couple scares where we’ve been told to evacuate, and it’s like, I think that’s when realization of what is next door hit the people because they’re like, well, what if we didn’t get to come back? Who’s going to compensate us for our homes? And that’s one of my biggest concerns and worries is where do we go and who’s going to help us?

John Farrell:
Prairie Island Indian Community isn’t the only Native Nation or the only community that’s dealing with the impact of a nearby nuclear plant or nuclear waste. To learn more about how this issue stretches beyond Prairie Island, we spoke with Heather Westra, who has worked for Prairie Island Indian Community, first as an employee, later as a consultant on issues related to the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant and the plant’s spent fuel storage.

Heather Westra:
These Prairie Islands are all across the country. You have them in states where all they have is the waste. They don’t have any power plant anymore, so these communities have, they can’t really redevelop the land until the waste is gone. These host communities like Prairie Island were never intended to be spent fuel storage communities. Nobody ever asked, do you want to host this material indefinitely? Right next to your homes, right next to your church, right next to your community center?And that’s the problem.

John Farrell:
There are 54 operating nuclear power plants today across 28 states, as well as others that have since shut down — each site with its own host community living near the plant and its spent fuel. Like Prairie Island, nuclear generating plants are typically built in rural areas near water. Though host communities may receive jobs or tax revenue from operating nuclear plants, they also live with the risk that an accident or negligence at the plant could harm their environment and health.

Today, 20 operating nuclear plants are located within 50 miles of Tribal reservation or trust land. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, though the Prairie Island community is just one of two Tribes with land 10 miles or closer. In addition to the nuclear plants, many more Native Nations and Indigenous peoples are impacted by other aspects of nuclear development. This includes extensive uranium mining on Dine lands and Navajo Nation, the removal of Yakama Nation peoples and contamination of their land from plutonium production, and nuclear weapons testing on the Marshall Islands. The U.S. government has also tested nuclear weapons and pursued a potential site for a national nuclear waste repository on unseated Western Shoshone land.

Back in the 1980s, the United States Congress committed to developing a federal repository to permanently store nuclear waste with a target opening date of 1998. A potential site at Yucca Mountain on Western Shoshone land in Nevada was identified, and customers of utility companies with nuclear plants have paid tens of billions of dollars into a federal nuclear waste fund over the years, but a federal disposal facility has never been built, leaving nuclear plants and the nearby communities with nowhere to send the waste.

Heather Westra:
The reason why there’s onsite storage at every plant, not just the Prairie Island plant, but every plant in the nation is because we have no national disposal facility for this material. So the utilities have had to sue the federal government for breach of contract, and they’ve paid out judgments to the tune of almost $11 billion already in judgments, and the estimates for the outstanding liability is estimated between $34 to $41 billion, and that’s a lot of money. That’s money that could be used to build schools, roads, new water systems, all kinds of infrastructure.

John Farrell:
This failure to develop a site for long-term nuclear waste storage, and the refusal of the federal government and electric utilities to properly consult Native of nations are continuations of prior broken promises and the trampling of Tribal sovereignty. Despite this legacy, the people of Prairie Island Indian Community have continued to advocate for themselves.

Heather Westra:
The main area of concern always has been is making sure that the Tribe is at the table whenever the issue is discussed, whenever any decision is being made, be it with state regulators, federal regulators, anybody in a position of authority, just making sure that the Tribe’s voice was being heard, I think has been the most important part of my job. And I think that the Tribe needs to be commended for the amount of work it does on this issue at a national level, using its own resources to be part of the national dialogue, to be part of a number of groups working on a solution. It’s easy to say, well, life would be a lot easier for the Tribe if the plant wasn’t there. It’s easy to say, well, it never should have been built, but it’s there. It was built, and it remains, and it remains a source of concern for community members every day.

John Farrell:
Because of concerns over what could happen to the community if something were to go wrong at the nuclear plant, the Tribe has used some of the compensation they’ve received over the years to purchase land farther away from Prairie Island and the nuclear plant. However, Tina Jefferson explained that this solution isn’t ideal.

Tina Jefferson:
They did buy land in Rochester, which is called Elk Run. That’s a thousand acres, but when we ultimately talked about it before, if we were going to relocate, we would want to be relocated somewhere where we have something like what we have here, someplace where there’s water, someplace where there’s land and we’re not all bottled in, or we’re still able to harvest and collect berries and hunt and fish and do the things that we’ve always been able to do down here. I mean, obviously our casino is here, and that’s not something that anybody’s going to let us just move. That’s our livelihood. So it’s kind of like, do we leave the corporation part here and do we move our people someplace safer? I’m sure a lot of our elders probably won’t relocate because they’ve been here all their lives and they probably don’t see them trying to uproot their whole lives to move someplace else.

John Farrell:
Looking back to the building of the nuclear generating plant and the construction of the lock and dam and back even further across the long history of Dakota, people, Councilman Childs reflected on what he would’ve told his ancestors at the time.

Michael Childs, Jr.:
It still comes down to the fact of resources, right? We really didn’t have resources to do much of anything, and quite frankly, the federal government never helped step in, and so how could we have, with such a small community, try to get these resources to come in. You know, because the Department of Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs should have stepped in — along the way for all of it, not just nuclear plant. Having all these three things, plus being the closest community to an operating nuclear plant, spent nuclear fuel, we don’t seem to make a dent anywhere, and it gets frustrating. You know what I mean? Because we have to keep telling our story over and over and people, yeah, we feel bad for you, but where does that go? Right? That’s frustrating that the federal government doesn’t seem to have that responsibility, and state of Minnesota doesn’t seem to care much either. I mean, people help out, but it’s still, would you live here? Our federal recognition is also tied to this land, right? So it’s not like we can just pick up and move.

It is sad because it is kind of similar to the boarding schools in a way. It’s forced on us and there’s not much respect being given. So I think if I could do something, I would tell them this is our treaty rights. Contrary to popular belief in Minnesota, not all Dakota, were exiled out of Minnesota. We’re proof of that, right? We’re one of the four Dakota Tribes that are proof of that, so I won’t get into that history, but we are legally here. We’re not exiled. We retain treaty rates, and according to them treaty rights, they should have consulted with us and we should have been the ones that make that decision, and I think that’s what I would tell people if I could travel back in time. My own people, you do have them treaty rights, and here they are. I’m starting to know more and more all the time, but here’s where we start.

John Farrell:
Thank you for listening to the first episode of Seven Hundred Yards: How a Native Nation resisted the Nuclear Plant Next Door, a three-part series from Local Energy Rules. In the next episode, we’re going to take a closer look at a state law from the early 1990s that managed to kickstart the renewable energy transition in Minnesota, but at the cost of green lighting a growing and essentially permanent pile of spent nuclear fuel on Prairie Island. For more content and information related to today’s episode, please check out the accompanying story map. A link to this page is in the show notes.

A quick note on the language we used in this episode. We used the word Tribe as well as the term Indian in the context of Prairie Island Indian Community’s federally recognized name. European colonial powers develop these terms to otherwise and subjugate Native peoples, and they can be used today to diminish the sovereignty of Native Nations. We opted to use these terms in the podcast because of the context in which they’re used, and because many Native and non-Native people continue to use these words. We acknowledged that this is an imperfect decision.

Katie Kienbaum produced Seven Hundred Yards with assistance from Jo Green. Local Energy Rules is produced by me and Maria McCoy. Editing, music and sound production is by Andrew Frank. Thank you to everyone we interviewed or who otherwise helped us put this series together, including Michael Childs, Tina Jefferson, Andrea Zimmerman, Heather Westra, Eric Pehle, George Crocker, Rick Duncan, David Morris, Kate Taylor Mighty, and John Bailey.

ILSR’S offices are located on land that was and is stewarded by Indigenous peoples. This includes an office in the traditional territory of the Dakota people and what is also known as Minneapolis, an office in the traditional territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy, which is currently comprised of the Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, Abenaki, and Micmac nations, in what is also known as Portland, Maine. ILSR’s hometown is in the traditional territory of the Nacotchtank or Anacostan and Piscataway peoples, in what is also known as Washington, D.C. ILSR recognizes supports and advocates for the sovereignty of Native Nations.

Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear more powerful stories of communities taking on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local, and thanks for listening.

• StoryMap: The Nuclear Plant Next Door

• Prairie Island Indian Community website
• Tinta Wita/Prairie Island Indian Community – Minn. Indian Affairs Council

• Bdote Memory Map
• Dakota Land Maps and Place Names – Marlena Myles and Dahi
• Dakota of Minnesota – Dakota Wicohan
• National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition website
• US-Dakota War of 1862 – Minnesota Historical Society
• US-Dakota War of 1862 – University of Minnesota, College of Liberal Arts, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

• Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, Unit 1 – U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, Unit 2 – U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Nuclear Waste Storage in Minnesota – Minnesota Legislative Reference Library
• Comments on Draft SETS, NUREG-1437, Supplement 39, Regarding the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, Units 1 and 2 (2010) – Prairie Island Indian Community
• “Xcel Energy agrees to pay Prairie Island $7.5 million more a year to store spent nuclear waste” (2023) – Walker Orenstein, MinnPost

• Nuclear explained – U.S. Energy Information Administration
• Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 198 – U.S. Congress
• Dry Cask Storage – U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Native American Reservations and Trust Lands within a 50-Mile Radius of a Nuclear Power Plant – U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• Confronting Nuclear Racism – Prairie Island Coalition
• “Our Homes are not Dumps: Creating Nuclear-Free Zones” – Grace Thorpe, Natural Resources Journal, Volume 36, Issue 4, Fall 1996
• “How Native Land Became a Target for Nuclear Waste” (2022) – Sanjana Manjeshwar, Inkstick