The Associated Press
July 14, 2004

MONTPELIER - Two highly radioactive pieces of spent nuclear fuel were found Tuesday where they belong, in the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant's spent fuel pool, three months after they were reported missing.

The discovery was made by engineers using a special tool to open a container in the pool, which houses thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the plant's 32 years of operation, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman said.

Two earlier robotic searches of the pool had failed to turn up the container. Its existence became known last week when investigators found a record at a General Electric laboratory in California that the container had been shipped to Vermont Yankee sometime during the 1980s.

"We earlier had checked all the containers in the pool, but when we learned that General Electric had designed and sent a pipe-like cylinder for the fuel-rod pieces, we rechecked the videotapes,'' said Jay Thayer, site vice president in charge of Vermont Yankee for its owner, Entergy Nuclear.

"That's when we noticed that what was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure could very well be the canister that GE sent here,'' Thayer said.

The news in April that the radioactive spent fuel segments, likely lethal to anyone exposed to them, were unaccounted for came at a sensitive time for the 32-year-old reactor. Entergy Nuclear has a request pending before the NRC to boost its power output by 20 percent.

Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC's Northeast regional office, said the federal agency was withholding judgment on the latest developments at the Vermont plant.

The discovery of the GE records prompted engineers at Vermont Yankee to build a new tool that could go into the spent fuel pool, open the container and check its contents.

The container was described as a 40-inch-long cylinder about four inches across - easily large enough to hold the two fuel pieces, described as 9 and 17 inches long and about as thick as a pencil.

After the announcement that the fuel segments were missing, plant officials said they believed the segments were in cylinders welded to a bucket at the bottom of the 40-foot-deep spent fuel pool.

Raymond Shadis of the nuclear watchdog group New England coalition said Tuesday that the discovery of the fuel rods in a separate cylinder raised questions about what had been in the bucket and what had become of it.

"These kinds of open questions, they don't give anyone any feeling of security with respect to how they handle spent nuclear materials,'' he said.

Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams said discussions about the fuel having been in the bucket were "speculation early in the investigation.''

"We've done a thorough search of the pool and this completes the inventory,'' Williams said.

Sheehan said the NRC plans its own investigation.

The fuel rod segments were never 'missing' from the plant – they were in the spent fuel pool all along, where they belong. The issue was caused by flawed record keeping from decades long before Entergy purchased the plant.

Entergy acquired the plant two years ago. The policies for record keeping and documentation of activities in the spent fuel pool have been revised to ensure accurate record keeping. We have adopted Entergy processes and procedures to ensure that this documentation will be scrupulously maintained in the future. We want to make sure this doesn't happen again.

Vermont Yankee now has a documented, accountable basis for 100 percent of the fuel material used at the facility since it came on-line in 1972.