Obama Amendment Would Require Tracking of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rods
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Printable FormatFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Washington Contact: Robert Gibbs or Tommy Vietor, (202) 228-5511
Illinois Contact: Julian Green, (312) 886-3506
Date: June 8, 2005
OBAMA AMENDMENT WOULD REQUIRE TRACKING OF SPENT NUCLEAR FUEL RODS
Plan Adopted in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
WASHINGTON - U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) Wednesday passed a provision in the Environment and Public Works Committee that requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to track unaccounted-for spent nuclear fuel rods used at power plants in the United States. Spent nuclear fuel is periodically removed from reactors in nuclear power plants.
"In the hands of terrorists, such highly radioactive materials, when coupled with conventional explosives, could be turned into a dirty bomb that could pose a catastrophic threat to public safety," Obama said. "All nuclear power plants should track their fuel better, and in the same way. Misplacing spent fuel rods cannot be tolerated, and this provision ensures better safeguards at plants to prevent future mistakes and to keep these dangerous materials from falling into the wrong hands."
A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that inadequate oversight and incomplete safety procedures have lead to lost, misplaced or unaccounted-for nuclear fuel rods. Within the past five years, three plants - the Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Connecticut, the Vermont Yankee plant in Vermont, and the Humboldt Bay Power Plant in California - have reported missing spent fuel. Earlier, several other plants also had missing or unaccounted-for spent fuel rods or rod fragments.
The missing nuclear material from Millstone was never found. The unaccounted-for material at Vermont Yankee was found three months later in a location other than the one indicated by inventory records, and officials are still investigating the Humboldt Bay plant's missing spent nuclear material.
The GAO found that the terrorist attacks of September 11 heightened concerns about tracking and accounting-for spent nuclear materials "by raising questions about whether these highly radioactive materials could be diverted or stolen and used maliciously." The report also concluded that "the potential exists for missing or unaccounted-for spent fuel rods to be discovered at additional plants."
Senator Obama's provision would require the NRC to establish specific and uniform guidelines for tracking, controlling and accounting for individual spent fuel rods or segments at nuclear power plants, including procedures for conducting physical inventories. The legislation would also establish uniform inspection procedures to ensure plants put these procedures in place.
Current NRC regulations do not require plants to track individual spent fuel rods or loose fragments, and these materials may or may not be accounted-for in the inventory. Because the NRC considered the risk of spent fuel being lost or stolen from a plant to be very low, in 1988 it chose to stop routine inspections of plants.
The nation has 103 operating nuclear power plants which annually produce over 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel. Senator Obama's provision was attached to S. 864, a bill to update the Atomic Energy Act of 1954.