Millstone can't seem to find two spent fuel rods
By Paul Choiniere - More Articles
Published on 12/9/2000

Waterford — Operators at the closed Millstone 1 nuclear plant have misplaced two highly-radioactive fuel rods. Company officials are expressing confidence the fuel rods are being stored safely; they are just not sure where.

Entergy Inc., the company cleaning up the nuclear plant that last operated in 1995, discovered the problem when it was doing an inventory of all the spent fuel produced by the plant during 25 years of service. It could not account for the two fuel rods that were removed from the reactor back in 1972.

The fuel rods could be in the plant's spent fuel storage pool, but not located yet, or they may have been transported to a General Electric facility in California, which manufactured them, according to company and federal officials. A more unlikely scenario, said the company, is that the fuel rods were transported to a radioactive waste dump.

Joe Besade, a Waterford resident and member of the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, made light of the confusion.

“Northeast Utilities thinks the deadly spent fuel rods are in a state beginning with 'C,' but not Colorado,” Besade said. “So they're either on the East Coast or the West Coast. It's a good thing NU has narrowed it down.”

Pete Hyde, a spokesman for the company, said the issue is attributable to a past problem in record keeping and is not reflective of how the nuclear station is run today.

“The record keeping at Millstone 2 and 3 is meticulous,” said Hyde of the two operating plants at Millstone.

Filled with uranium pellets needed to trigger an atomic reaction, the spent fuel rods are 12-feet long and the width of a finger. Inside a nuclear reactor, hundreds of rods are grouped together in bundles called fuel assemblies. In 1972 an assembly was damaged and disassembled by General Electric. During the process the two fuel rods in question were bent and could not be reused.

Millstone officials say their records show the two rods were put in a special storage box inside the plant's spent fuel pool, where all the nuclear waste produced by the reactor is stored. Records dated 1979 and 1980 show the box stored in the northwest corner of the spent fuel pool. It is not there now and records after 1980 do not refer to it at all.

Since 1980 significant work has been done in the storage pool, with spent fuel assemblies moved around and into different racks as space in the pool began to get tighter.

Due to the unique nature of the special fuel rod box, Millstone operators do not consider it likely the fuel
rods were shipped out as waste, but until the items are accounted for, they can't rule it out. There is no
national facility for storing the fuel rods, classified as high-level waste. It would have been a federal violation to take such material to a low-level radioactive waste dump.

Hyde said Millstone officials will locate the fuel rods. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is monitoring the situation. An NRC official refused to speculate about the location of the fuel rods.

“We just don't know at this point,” said Todd J. Jackson, lead NRC inspector for the Millstone 1 decommissioning. “There is no way to know where it went.”

Jackson said it was premature to discuss the potential for penalties against NU.

Hyde said the most likely scenario is that the fuel rods were relocated and are still in the 40-foot-deep spent fuel pool.

A container that may house the rods has been seen in the pool, but Millstone needs GE's assistance to inspect it. All work must be done in the pool using remotely-operated equipment and cameras. The water shields the radiation.

The ability to monitor spent fuel was the subject of recent hearings involving Millstone. The Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, which has its office in Mystic, sought unsuccessfully to block a license amendment at the Millstone 3 reactor.

The amendment will allow Millstone 3 engineers to reconfigure and add storage racks at that plant so more waste can be stored in the spent fuel pool.

Opponents had argued the additional spent fuel increased the chance of an accident in the event fuel was placed in the wrong position in the pool.

In dismissing the coalition's petition opposing the amendment, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board ruled in October that the company “has demonstrated it can adhere to administrative controls with adequate safety margin and defense-in-depth.”

David A. Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists, testified for the coalition at the hearings. He said news of the misplaced fuel rods is disquieting.

“It's further proof that company promises to always put the fuel rods in only the right places in the Unit 3 spent fuel pool will probably be broken,” he said.