Dominion Is Urged to Account For Fuel rods At Millstone 2
NRC's Recommendation Stems From Loss Of Rods At Millstone 1
By PATRICIA DADDONA
Day Staff Writer, Waterford
Published on 6/3/2004
Waterford — A federal resident inspector at Millstone Power Station has recommended that the plant owner, Dominion Nuclear Connecticut, physically take inventory of boxed spent fuel at Millstone 2.
Similar recommendations are anticipated at 11 of the 103 other nuclear plants around the country as part of a nationwide review. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission initiated the study last November in response to the loss four years ago of two fuel rods at Millstone 1, said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. That plant is now being decommissioned.
There is no evidence that more spent fuel rods have gone missing at Millstone, Sheehan said, but the Millstone 1 incident and a similar case at a Vermont Yankee power plant served as a wake-up call.
The nationwide review “is being done on a one-time basis to make sure plants have good control over what's in their spent fuel pools,” Sheehan said. “There is an even higher sensitivity to properly safeguard this material post 9/11.”
The directive applies to both operating and decommissioned power plants. Security concerns related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, prevented the NRC from starting its review sooner, he said.
While the initiative could lead to NRC policy changes, the main intent is to gather specific information at every plant about spent fuel and how it is managed. What happened at Millstone theoretically could happen anywhere, a manual outlining the process states.
The two rods missing from Millstone 1 disappeared when the plant was owned and operated by Northeast Utilities. Dominion purchased the power plants in 2001.
The accounting review is being conducted in three phases. In the first, power plant owners and federal inspectors must determine whether any fuel rods have ever been removed from their assemblies and placed in metal boxes, which Dominion calls “lockers,” or other containers.
In Phase 2, the owner must account for those “reconstituted” fuel rods through record-keeping or other means. Phase 3 — the phase the inspector has recommended Millstone carry out — involves an intensive inspection to locate and account for the waste.
Most power plants store radioactive spent fuel rods in various-sized assemblies and then submerge the assemblies in 40-foot-deep pools. The water, treated with boron, inhibits fission, the nuclear reaction used to generate electricity in the reactor core, and cools the rods.
The planned final repository for contaminated nuclear waste, an underground storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, failed to open in 1998 and remains years away from operation.
The assemblies in the spent fuel pools can be accounted for by sight, but that is not true for fuel rods that were taken out of the assemblies and stored in other containers, Sheehan said.
Alternate containers have been used over the years for various reasons, he said – sometimes to conserve space in the pools while waiting for Yucca Mountain and at other times for inspection of damaged rods.
At Millstone 2 in the mid-1980s, Northeast Utilities took 1,106 14-foot-long radioactive fuel rods from their assemblies, primarily at the Millstone 2 plant, and placed them in stainless steel “lockers” at the bottom of a spent fuel pool to save space, said Pete Hyde, spokesman for Dominion.
The three lockers at Millstone 2 are sealed with a tab at the top that slips in and locks shut, and can be opened only with a highly specialized tool that moves the tab, Hyde said. Dominion doesn't have the tool, but could get it from the manufacturer, he said.
Dominion has great confidence in its record keeping, Hyde said, in contrast to the accounting used by Northeast Utilities, which paid a $288,000 fine for losing track of two fuel rods that have never been located.
The company is not surprised to be one of the 12 considered for a more intensive review, said Hyde, but the company doesn't believe the step is necessary.
“It's not just Dominion, it's the whole industry,” he said. “We are asking, with the industry, the question, ‘Why is this necessary?' These boxes were not designed to be opened. So to do so, we'd have to go to extraordinary lengths to confirm what's in there.”
“We have trained and qualified reactor engineers and oversight representatives who physically counted every single one of those rods that went into those lockers,” Hyde said.
When it comes to handling fuel rods, Hyde said, less handling is also safer.
Sheehan could not say whether the NRC would endorse the inspector's recommendation for a third phase of physical inventories at Millstone or any other plant. He did not identify the other 12 plants recommended for Phase 3 scrutiny.
He did say Dominion's objections have some validity and will need to be “worked out.”
“To satisfy our comfort level,” he added, “if the opening of those boxes is required, that's what they'll have to do.”
The chance of finding more missing fuel rods at any of the plants is “extremely remote,” Sheehan said, particularly with today's heightened level of security. However, the incident at Millstone 1 prompted officials at Vermont Yankee to double-check a container; they subsequently found two sections of a fuel rod missing, he said.
At Millstone 1, the NRC determined there was a good chance the missing fuel rods mistakenly ended up at a low-level radioactive waste in Barnwell, S.C., but that, Sheehan said, is only an educated guess.
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