Nuke plant missing two fuel rods Associated Press December 10, 2000 WATERFORD — Operators of the now-defunct Millstone 1 nuclear plant have been unable to account for two highly radioactive fuel rods. The rods were removed in 1972, but there is no record of where they were placed, plant officials said Friday.

Entergy Inc., the company cleaning up the nuclear plant that last operated in 1995, discovered the problem when it was doing an inventory of all the spent fuel produced by the plant during 25 years of service.

Company officials are expressing confidence the fuel rods are being stored safely; they just are not sure where.

Filled with uranium pellets needed to trigger an atomic reaction, the spent fuel rods are 12-feet long and the width of a finger. Inside a nuclear reactor, hundreds of rods are grouped together in bundles called fuel assemblies.

In 1972, an assembly was damaged and disassembled by General Electric. During the process the two fuel rods in question were bent and could not be reused.

Millstone records show the two rods were put in a special storage box inside the plant’s spent fuel pool, where all the nuclear waste produced by the reactor is stored.

Records dated 1979 and 1980 show the box stored in the northwest corner of the spent fuel pool.

It is not there now, and records after 1980 do not refer to it at all.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is monitoring the situation. An NRC official refused to speculate about the location of the fuel rods.

"We just don’t know at this point," said Todd J. Jackson, lead NRC inspector for the Millstone 1 decommissioning. "There is no way to know where it went."

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-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), December 10, 2000