MONTPELIER -- The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will conduct a special investigation into why the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant lost track of highly radioactive spent fuel that turned up where it was supposed to be.
Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the federal agency's Northeast regional office in Pennsylvania, said the investigation would begin next month and that NRC personnel would be at the Vernon plant and its corporate offices in Brattleboro for several weeks.
"There are still some questions unanswered regarding, first of all, why this material was unaccounted for, even if only temporarily, and why they had a breakdown in their record-keeping," Sheehan said Wednesday.
Sheehan said the goal of the NRC probe would be "to get a read on the overall health of their nuclear materials accountability program." He said the NRC has "pretty proscriptive" rules on keeping track of spent nuclear fuel.
Vermont Yankee's owner, Entergy Nuclear, announced on Tuesday that it had located two pieces of spent fuel in a container in the plant's spent fuel pool. That word came three months after the company announced that the fuel segments were not in another container where they were thought to be and were unaccounted for.
Officials with Entergy, which bought Vermont Yankee two years ago from a consortium of New England utilities, had spent the last three months using robots to search the spent fuel pool, doing records checks and interviewing employees who were at the plant in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams said Wednesday that he did not have an estimate of how much the company's investigation, which he said likely would wrap up in a week, would end up costing. He said a team of Entergy staff and outside contractors spent between 9,000 and 10,000 hours on the effort.
The fuel pieces broke off a fuel rod assembly in 1979 and were put in storage shortly thereafter.
Entergy said a check of records at a General Electric laboratory in California last week turned up evidence that GE had shipped Vermont Yankee a container specially designed to hold the broken fuel pieces.
Williams said that while GE had the shipping record, Vermont Yankee did not have a record indicating that the container had been received.
"The present-day requirement is that it would be kept. I really can't speculate about back then," Williams said.
Company officials said the pipe-like container was missed on earlier searches of the pool with video cameras because it appeared to be part of the pool's equipment.
Sheehan said it was not surprising that the earlier searches failed to turn up the missing fuel. "The pool is 40 feet deep. It's difficult to see the different locations in the pool. That's all the more reason why they have to have a very thorough set of records."
Gov. James Douglas said in an interview Wednesday that "the good news from the safety standpoint is that they have been in the spent fuel rod pool all along. I'm concerned that we didn't know there whereabouts of the missing rods for some time." Douglas said that's why he called for "the most exhaustive investigation possible."
David O'Brien, commissioner of Vermont's Department of Public Service, said his department would be closely monitoring the NRC's investigation. He said he was pleased that the fuel pieces, which can be lethal to a person exposed to them, had been found.
"The tremendous good news here is that we do know where they are and we don't have to ponder the what-ifs," O'Brien said.
Of the diligence of Entergy's efforts to solve the missing fuel mystery, O'Brien said, "They did just what we would expect them to do. ... That's what you expect a licensee of a nuclear plant to be able to do, just like we expect our utilities to keep the lights on."
"I think there is an opportunity here to appreciate the hard work of people at the facility who have been under a lot pressure the last few months, a lot of stress," O'Brien added.
Sheehan said the special investigation into the lost-and-found fuel would be separate from a special engineering assessment of several plant systems the NRC will do as it reviews Vermont Yankee's request for permission to increase its power output by 20 percent. The engineering assessment was requested by the state Public Service Board at the suggestion of the nuclear watchdog group New England Coalition.
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.
