Missing Yankee Nuclear Fuel Rods Found

From the Champlain Channel WPTZ-TV
Fuel Rods Found In Pool At Plant

POSTED: 8:21 pm EDT July 13, 2004
UPDATED: 9:24 am EDT July 14, 2004

VERNON, Vt. -- Two highly radioactive pieces of spent nuclear fuel reported missing three months ago appear to have been where they were supposed to be all along.

A spokesman for the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Vermont Yankee has told the NRC it found the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool at the plant. Vermont Yankee officials said last week they had found records at a General Electric laboratory in California that appeared to provide a key clue as to the fuel pieces' whereabouts.

Workers found the spent rods inside a cylinder that was sent to Vermont Yankee by GE specifically to hold the fuel segments. Searchers found the canister at the bottom of the spent rod pool and opened it up, discovering the rods late Tuesday afternoon. Vermont Yankee said it has updated its records to make sure something like that doesn't happen again.

Yankee Nuclear Powers Up Once More...Er, Hold That Thought

BURLINGTON, Vt. -- There was another scare Thursday morning at Vermont Yankee. This, after the nuclear power plant had just resumed full power Wednesday night following a fire that forced a 19-day shutdown.

Officials said an excess of oil caused black smoke to blow out of a furnace inside a building on the grounds Thursday morning. An onsite fire brigade shut off the furnace switch a little after 4 a.m. A representative for the plant's parent company said there was no damage or injuries from the incident.

I don't know about you, but I'd feel a little leery of uprating an old plant with repeated "problems" like this...and they still haven't found the missing two pieces of fuel rod.

Chernobyl Explorer: Alexander Borovoi

Dr. Alexander Borovoi is one of the people interviewed (his segment starts at 32:40) in this astounding BBC documentary from 1991, "Inside Chernobyl's Sarcophagus." Borovoi and his colleagues Viktor Popov, Yuri Buzulukov, and other "Stalkers" speak with western journalists for the first time since the accident. The scientists and BBC crew enter the Reactor 4 building taking measurements and video footage of its wreckage, in extreme haste (due to the radiation levels) and incredibly dangerous conditions. Footage had to be shot by actual cameramen working quickly, as the searing radiation and rough ground caused robotic camera rigs to mire or fail within minutes. In one segment we see a clever improvisation: the team jerry-rigged a small videocamera onto a wire remote-controlled child's toy tank. The end of the documentary is an interview with Borovoi and Popov five years later, where we revisit their dire predictions, and the surviving members of the "bio-robot" team.





[UPDATE: Borovoi's 2008 presentation detailing the state of the Chernobyl corium, or "melt." (PowerPoint on SarNet.org] 64-year old Alexander Borovoi is a brave man, and a very lucky one; he is one of the "extreme explorers" who periodically examined the inside of the Chernobyl sarcophagus to spot developing problems. From US News and World Report:

The line between hero and victim was thin in the first frantic weeks after the accident. Firemen fought the flames but lacked instruments to tell them they faced lethal doses of radiation. Military helicopter pilots hovered in the radioactive smoke plume to smother the burning reactor with tons of sand and lead, but their bombing runs missed the mark.

Yet the catastrophe–and the chance for heroism–did not end when the fire burned out. In the months and years that followed, a band of scientists led by physicist Alexander Borovoi explored the reactor's corpse to make sure it could not reawaken. Working in a hot, dark labyrinth where lingering radiation could kill within minutes, they mapped and analyzed tons of reactor fuel remaining. It was heroism of a quieter and more effective order than had come before. "Borovoi knew what he was doing," says Harvard University nuclear physicist Richard Wilson, "and he had the imagination and common sense" to succeed.

To find the remnants, Borovoi and his men had to venture into the heart of the destroyed reactor. Robots were not up to the job; they got stuck in debris or ran amok, circuits scrambled by radiation. "We had only one kind of robots [that worked]," says Borovoi. "Biorobots–ourselves." They called themselves "stalkers." Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protection–lead suits were too bulky for dashes through the reactor. A fall or wrong turn could be fatal.

Late in 1986, beyond a gantlet of highly radioactive rooms and narrow passages, the stalkers discovered a glassy, black formation resembling a giant elephant's foot. Getting a piece to analyze was not easy. It was so fiercely radioactive that the scientists could spend only seconds near it, and its surface shrugged off a drilling machine and an ax. Finally a marksman took aim with a Kalashnikov rifle. The shards gave the first clues to what had happened to the nuclear fuel and the chance of a future catastrophe.

[read full article]

Nuclear SciFi: The Prometheus Crisis (1975)

From the frontispiece of this creepy summertime read (out of print, but not too hard to find used):

"...another angel approached me.

This one was quietly but appropriately dressed in cellophane, synthetic rubber and stainless steel, but his mask was the blind mask of Ares, snouted for gasmasks. He was neither soldier, sailor, farmer, dictator or munitions-manufacturer. Nor did he have much conversation except to say,

"You will not be saved by General Motors or the prefabricated house, you will not be saved by dialectic materialism or the Lambeth conference, you will not be saved by Vitamin D or the expanding universe. In fact, you will not be saved."

-- Nightmare with Angels, Stephen Vincent Benét

Eerily similar to another passage, used by John Carpenter in Prince of Darkness ("You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved by the God Plutonium. In fact... YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED!"), the opening sets an ominous tone for this frightening, technically-detailed disaster novel.

Switching dramatically between post-disaster government hearings and the events leading up to it, this fictionalized scenario set at "the world's largest nuclear plant in California" has an exceptional sense of pacing, drawing the reader into a tense technological page-turner not unlike Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1971). The Prometheus Crisis predates Three Mile Island by four years, and Chernobyl by eleven, and presciently foretells the tangled bureaucratic nightmare that occured along with the public panic in the real world of TMI and Chernobyl.