Vermont Nuclear Plant Looking for Missing Fuel Rods

MONTPELIER, Vt. - Two highly radioactive fuel rods from a Vermont nuclear plant are missing, plant officials said.

Engineers at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant are searching for two missing pieces of a highly radioactive fuel rod while experts acknowledged they may never be found.

The operators of the nuclear power plant reported the missing pieces, saying they were not where they were supposed to be in the large pool in which used fuel rods are stored. Vermont Yankee is located in the southeastern town of Vernon, on the border with Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

One of the missing pieces is about the size of a pencil. The other is about the thickness of a pencil and 17 inches long.

"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.

The pieces were part of a fuel rod that was removed in 1979 from the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently shut down for refueling and maintenance and could have been sent years ago to a testing laboratory or a low-level nuclear waste disposal facility.

The used fuel rods are stored in a pool that is 40 feet deep and contains 2,789 fuel assemblies.

The pencil-thin fuel rods are 12 feet long and filled with uranium pellets. Sheehan said that the missing pieces might have been cut from longer rods for testing or could have broken when they were removed from the fuel assemblies.

The search for the missing pieces was going to include the use of a remote controlled camera in the pool as well as review of the documents dating back decades that cover shipments and movements of radioactive material.

Sheehan cited the heightened awareness of the need to control nuclear material that followed the Sept. 11 terror attacks. "We don't want this falling into the wrong hands," he said. "This is something we would never take lightly."

After speaking with the head of the NRC, Vermont's govermor, James Douglas said that "this situation is intolerable," and that he was "very concerned" about the missing fuel at the plant, run by Entergy Nuclear.

In 2002 a Connecticut nuclear plant was fined $288,000 after a similar loss. That fuel was never accounted for.

Vermont's Public Safety Department and Homeland Security Unit also were notified of the missing fuel.