Regulators keeping tighter tabs on dangerous radioactive material

Regulators keeping tighter tabs on dangerous radioactive material
By GREG CLARYTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: August 14, 2007)
BUCHANAN - Specially trained contractors broke open a bolted box at the bottom of Indian Point 3's spent-fuel pool this month, hoping to find tiny amounts of weapons-grade uranium 235 that federal officials want to verify haven't been misplaced, lost or stolen.
The work - done underwater with equipment operated from above - should be finished in the next few days, and Indian Point officials expect to find all the radioactive isotopes they're supposed to.
Still, the process is painstaking.
"You can't just empty the contents of the boxes on the floor and start counting," said Indian Point spokesman Jim Steets. "One of the boxes gave the guys trouble just to get it opened."
Federal regulators are requiring an updated inventory of "special nuclear material" at nuclear plants across the country and have found a few cases - including Indian Point - where the storage methods and records don't meet Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards.
Those gaps bring into focus the storage of radioactive isotopes that, before Sept. 11, 2001, were considered so dangerous to handle that thieves wouldn't risk certain suicide to steal them.
"The current threat environment has changed the NRC's perspective of the self-protecting nature of this material," said Martha Williams, the agency official most responsible for ensuring inventories are accurate. "Ten years ago it never occurred to anybody that somebody would give up their life to get something like this."
It's pretty clear from experts that those trying to grab some plutonium or enhanced uranium to create a radiological disaster wouldn't get far at a nuclear plant without taking extraordinary precautions.
"When you're talking about somebody trying to steal or deliver the material, the radiation around that spent-fuel pool would be so high that if you didn't have the proper equipment, you'd have only minutes to live," said Joseph Alverez, a health physicist with more than 30 years' experience in radiation-protection programs, most of that with the U.S. Department of Energy.
"It would be like trying to walk into a place that's 300 degrees and expecting to live," Alverez said. "We're talking about radiation so strong, you're getting fried. Your nerves just go. Your body can't cool itself off."
NRC officials say that since terrorists have shown they will give their lives if the cause is important enough to them, the rules have changed, not just in tightened security measures, but also in the day-to-day warehousing of nuclear material.
So much so that the agency committed extra resources late last year to review all of its 104 nuclear plant inventories by the summer, even down to verifying amounts minute enough to force Indian Point to break open a box that had been closed since about 1988.
Entergy Nuclear, which owns and operates Indian Point, bought the power plant in 2001 and is responsible for visually verifying all its inventories.
"We have to account for metric tons (of special nuclear material)," said Robert "Monk" Hansler, the man responsible for Indian Point's inventory. "Almost all of it - probably 99.9 percent - is spent fuel."
The small remaining amount is either new fuel, instrumentation calibration samples, or detectors that measure the power of the nuclear reactors on site.
That last category is what caused the inventory problem at Indian Point and has cost other nuclear plants hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines when the detectors have turned up missing.
It's too early to know what the NRC will do on the issue with Indian Point, which was cited for not visually verifying each detector during annual inspections. Entergy said it believed the bolted container left over from previous owners was to be counted as a unit.
Federal regulators said company officials should have opened it because it was merely bolted shut, not sealed.
Indian Point isn't alone among plants that have had to find special nuclear material that wasn't properly inventoried.
As recently as last month, Dresden 3 in Morris, Ill., ran into trouble when officials couldn't locate two fuel pellets and 99 pieces of uranium used as in-core power detectors.
The items were last documented in 1977 in the reactor's spent- fuel pool and are still unaccounted for, NRC officials said yesterday.
There have been other cases, as well, including Entergy plants in Vermont and Massachusetts.
The case that raised the most auditing concerns, however, was the Millstone power plant in Waterford, Conn., which was fined $288,000 in 2002 for two fuel rods that were reported missing in 2000 and were never found.
Millstone, in fact, is the reason that the federal government started keeping a closer eye on the nuclear industry's fuel supplies - that and the terrorist attacks of 2001, NRC officials said.
A special investigation soon after those events led to a 2005 federal government report that cited a lack of visual verification of inventory and too great a reliance on record keeping that wasn't even computerized until more recent times.
"It's because of some of the problems ... that the NRC is now more in a Missouri mode, where you have to 'show me,' " said David Lochbaum, a nuclear specialist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. "In the past, a paperwork audit was enough and the change is leading to some of the situations that we have today like Indian Point's."
Lochbaum chided the NRC's lack of speed in arriving at the new attitude, noting that the Millstone discovery happened in late 1999 and that seven-plus years was too long to wait to enact tighter controls.
"The NRC is moving in the right direction on this, but they can turn a license renewal around in 24 months," Lochbaum said. "They're an agency that allegedly puts safety first."
Lochbaum and Alverez, as well as Entergy and NRC officials, all pointed out that the amounts of uranium 235 being reviewed at Indian Point are too small to make a bomb. The material has also been enriched to a maximum of 5 percent, while the amounts needed for an atomic bomb would be thousands of times greater and would have to be enriched to more than 90 percent.
"The uranium at a nuclear power plant, you can't make it into a bomb. You just can't blow that stuff up," Alverez said. "The stuff that could be made into a bomb, there just so little of it, you'd have to collect a bunch of it from a bunch of different places to do it."
He said the people who have enough nuclear material to make something dangerous are sanctioned labs set up for nuclear bomb research.
"Unless you're doing special types of experiments, you don't want that much of this material," Alverez said. "If you've got enough to make a bomb, and it gets together accidentally, you'd have a problem. It's very unstable."
Reach Greg Clary at 914-696-8566 or gclary@lohud.com.

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* CORRECTION : Previous post should read Professor George Gobel. I meant no slur against this late, great American humorist. May he rest in peace.
Posted by: ball on Wed Aug 15, 2007 4:58 am

On the humorous side......... TEN THINGS YOU DON'T WANT TO HEAR AT INDIAN POINT. 1 HEY! Is SMOKE coming out of the core normal? 2 Check your weapons at the door. 3 Who forgot to pay the water bill? 4 Oh yeah.....50 bucks says I can make it blow. 5 Man, I can't wait to get my hands on those 40 virgins! 6 Is that a " 60 MINUTES " film crew out there ? 7 Don't forget your homework. 8 Chernobyl........3 Mile Island......been there, done that. 9 Meet your new plant supervisor........Homer Simpson. 10 I'm chowing tuna MELT DOWN for lunch. Don't forget to share these jokes with a friend. J WAYNE LEONARD C E O ENTERGY HEADQUATERS 639 LOYOLA AVE. NEW ORLEANS, LA 70113 PHONE : 504-576-4000 FAX : 504-576-4428 The thought for today is from Professor George Goebels : Did you ever notice that Westchester County is a black tuxedo and Indian Point is a brown pair of shoes.
Posted by: ball on Tue Aug 14, 2007 3:58 pm

Well, Greg, this is excellent and surprisingly detailed coverage of a regulatory policy change that very few people have ever heard about (much less care about). It's reassuring in the face of constant negative characterization of NRC as a lapdog agency, to see that they indeed have the initiative to demand more out of their regulated sites. But, as in all things surrounding the "N" word, nothing, apparently, will ever be good enough for Mr. Lochbaum, one of the most notable fantasy-football phantom-NRC pretenders. In Lochbaum's fantasy NRC, they made the change retroactively, by going back in time, to before when the change was needed. You can do that, when you're running a fantasy NRC (Like Lochbaum is). Realworlders, unfortunately, are stuck doing everything one day at a time. But good for you, and good for NRC. I'm sort of caught in a bind here, about whether to chide you about the timing of your release of this piece, seemingly right "in the slot" between the announcement of the 14-day New Years Eve Lighted Ball countdown to the siren cutoff date, and no other news coming out of IPEC. But I guess you gotta sell hotcakes when they're hot, or find another name for 'em. You just have to watch out, lest you excite geriatric/histrionics like Nita Lowey into tossing around chilling phrases like "incompetency" , "loosey-goosey" etc. just to re-sell a few "lukewarm cakes" after TJN is done with them. What I'm saying, is that a looney alter-myth is just waiting to attach itself to your story series like a stachybotris mold, and that your constant exhumation of minutiae about IPEC could turn unhealthy, and promote untruth, lunacy, and a kind of greenshirt enviro-nazism...... all inadvertently, of course. Should our friend "ball" choose to attach his/her usual swatsticker-graffitti piece to the end of this post, you would have your object lesson that civility is easy to trash, and very hard to recover, and Journalists should not be in the business of tossing Haymarket Riot M80's on the printed page. ( Please show this post to your buddy Herb Pinder). I mean, William Randolph Hearst did it, and look what we got out of it....Imelda Marcos,... Fidel Castro,... and the Symbionese Liberation Army shooting people in Oakland with cyanide-dipped dum dum bullets. Anyway, the part you chose not to include was the existing 10CFR73 precautions, in place for decades, surrounding SNM with a veritable minefield of closed pathways, so that the scenarios you blithely elicit from Mr. Alvarez are not given the spin he hoped you would pick up on, namely that it is impossible to go anywhere near SNM, even for a jihadi willing to die. Nobody can take or misuse the stuff. NRC is just making sure nobody is fooling them with forged paper inventory sheets.
Posted by: VP_VP on Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:37 am

Stuart Bayer/The Journal News
The containment dome and spent-fuel pool building of Indian Point 2 in Buchanan is seen in this file photo.
Test planned today
As part of Entergy Nuclear's efforts to install a new $15 million emergency notification system, the company will conduct a full-volume test today of the 155 sirens spread out among the four counties surrounding the nuclear plants.The four-minute test is set for 10:30 a.m. Officials from Entergy, Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Orange counties, and the federal government will watch to see how the event stacks up against one held Saturday that showed a 96 percent success rate.The public is not required to do anything during the test. The sirens sound in a 10-mile radius of the nuclear plants and can't necessarily be heard inside homes or offices, especially if air conditioning is on.Entergy is facing an Aug. 24 deadline to install the new system.