Word: fueled
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...differently. In March 1992 he began working on Millstone 1, one of three nuclear plants perched on a neck of land that juts into Long Island Sound from the shore of southeastern Connecticut. He was checking specifications for a replacement part for a heat exchanger in the spent-fuel cooling system. To order the proper part, he needed to know the heat load. So he pulled a safety report that should contain the relevant data...
...convince me they had it analyzed," he says. He asked them to produce the documents, and they could not. Galatis sensed trouble when, in later talks, "they began denying that the first discussions had taken place." In June 1992 he spelled out the problem in a memo, calling the fuel pool a license violation and an "unreviewed safety question"--NRC lingo for a major regulatory headache-and adding other concerns he had found, such as the fact that some of the pool's cooling pipes weren't designed to withstand an earthquake, as they were required to do. Northeast...
...When I started in the industry, 20 years ago," Betancourt says, "spent fuel was considered the ass end of the fuel cycle. No one wanted to touch it. Everyone wanted to be on the sexy side, inside the reactor vessel, where the action and danger were. No one noticed fuel pools until we started running out of room in them...
...Consumers started paying into a federal fund meant to finance a storage site. Though the Energy Department has collected $8.3 billion, no facility has been completed; in a case of NIMBY writ large, no state wants such a site in its backyard. As the nation's stockpile of spent fuel reached 30,000 tons, activists seized the issue as a way to hobble the industry, and the Energy Department announced that a permanent facility planned for Yucca Mountain, Nevada, wouldn't be ready until 2010; Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary now puts its chances of opening at no better than...
...Slowly, we woke up to this problem," says Betancourt. The NRC relaxed standards and granted license amendments that allowed plants to "rerack" their rods in ever more tightly packed pools. Sandwiched between the rods is a neutron-absorbing material called Boraflex that helps keep them from "going critical." After fuel pools across the country were filled in this way, the industry discovered that radiation causes Boraflex to shrink and crack. The NRC is studying the problem, but at times its officials haven't bothered to analyze a pool's cooling capacity before granting a reracking amendment. "It didn't receive...