Vermont nuclear plant searching for missing fuel rods

Two pieces of a highly radioactive fuel rod are missing from a Vermont nuclear plant, and engineers planned to search onsite for the nuclear material, officials said Wednesday.

The fuel rod was removed in 1979 from the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently shut down for refueling and maintenance. Remote-control cameras will be used to search a spent fuel pool on the property, officials said.

"We do not think there is a threat to the public at this point. The great probability is this material is still somewhere in the pool," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan.

But Sheehan said it was possible the spent fuel was mixed in with a shipment of low-level nuclear waste and ended up at a repository in South Carolina, or a facility in Washington state. He said it was also possible it was taken to a nuclear testing facility run by General Electric, which designed the plant.

hmmmmmm. Wonder if this could possibly be an co-opted McVeigh/Osama type deal going on? May be jumping to conclusions, but sounds like pretty scary stuff. And both incidents occuring in the NE part of the USA.

I thought most commerical truckers today had tracking devices on them where the home terminal could locate them anywhere in the USA. Similar to a GPS homing device.

I work in the nuclear electricity generation industry as a contractor for a company that repairs and maintains nukes.

There is no way spent fuel rods can be handled by people and transported anywhere outside the nuclear plant from which they would have to take them. It requires machines, robotic devices some would say, to move fuel rods from place to place within the nuke itself and into the spent fuel pit.

The rods are simply too hot radiologically for a group of persons to take them off the property; they would not even be able to get them through the considerable security safeguards of a nuclear plant. It requires many checkpoints, ID card readings and ultimately a hand geometry device to exit a nuke. The rods could not be concealed nor would they pass through the multi-pronged turnstiles. Alarms would start sounding all over the place before the people got to the first checkpoint anyway and security guards with M-16s would come running so fast it would make your head swim.

One person could not lift one stainless steel fuel rod approximately 15 feet long and eight inches in diameter filled with highly radioactive fuel denser, thus heavier, than lead and get it out of 25 feet of water or out of the Radiation Containment Building itself. It just will not happen. The people would die handling it in a matter of a few hours even if using the best state-of-the-art isolation suits.

It is just as the utility officials said: the rods are in the spent fuel pit which is usually +/- 30' wide x 100' long x 40' deep. The pit is about 40' feet deep because the 15' rods are stored upright under approximately 25' of water.

Thanks for the information. I never realized the process by which nuclear product could be transported. The media makes us average joes think you could put it in a suitcase and transport it out with the cooperation of a few paid sources.

I certainly have benefited from FR. My world of knowledge has increased tremendously due to the participation of folks like you, willing to share your first had knowledge.

I understand your quandary, born, but it is just like the plant engineers have said, the rods are still in the SFP(spent fuel pit). Spent fuel rods are not necessarily completely spent to be put in the SFP. All the fuel rods are put in the SFP, spent or not, whenever there is a maintenance outage, which usually happens to every nuclear generator annually.

During each outage the rods are transported vertically underwater from the beast itself to a hole in the wall of the 'can,' the radiation containment building itself, where it is laid sideways to travel through the hole, still underwater, and passes horizontally into the SFP.

All this happens under about 25' of a solution of water and boron which serves as a very effective shield preventing the escape of radioactivity into the environment and protecting us techs. After the rods pass through the wall of the 'can' an "up-ender" returns it to verticality and is placed upright onto the bottom of the SFP. When the fuel in the rod is truly spent it may remain for years in the SFP. Some spent fuel rods once permanently stored have never been removed from the SFP since their respective nukes have gone online. It is plausible that very old records of the SFP are incomplete and require an audit of each rod stored to trace its paper trail.

Records of each fuel rod are kept somewhere, I do not know. I don't handle that. Since the last nuclear plant was built in the USA about twenty-five or thirty years ago, many are older, it is easy to see that a rod's exact location in the SFP get blurred under 25' of dark blue (from the boron) water. No fuel rod can ever be removed from the SFP or the 'can' without extensive redundant shielding, a vast paper trail of RWPs (radiation work permits) with multiple signatures and precise records.

The rods are still in the SFP. That's it. End of story.

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