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In 1982 Congress mandated that the Department of Energy begin to accept nuclear waste from commercial reactors in 1998. 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 fifty-fifty. Bills to create temporary sites are stalled in both houses of Congress.
"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 the attention that more obvious safety concerns got," says Inspector General Norton.
Then, in late 1992, David Lochbaum and Don Prevatte, consultants working at Pennsylvania Power & Light's Susquehanna plant, began to analyze deficiencies in spent-fuel cooling systems. They realized that a problem had been sneaking up on the industry: half a dozen serious accidents at different plants had caused some water to drain from the pools. In the worst of them, at Northeast's Haddam Neck plant in 1984, a seal failure caused 200,000 gal. to drain in just 20 min. from a water channel next to the fuel pool. If the gate between the channel and the pool had been open, the pool could have drained, exposing the rods and causing a meltdown. Says Lochbaum: "It was a near miss."
The NRC insists that the chance of such an accident is infinitesimal. But the agency's risk-assessment methods have been called overly optimistic by activists, engineers and at least one NRC commissioner. The agency's analysis for a fuel-pool drainage accident assumes that at most one-third of a core is in the pool, even though plants across the country routinely move full cores into pools crowded with older cores. If the NRC based its calculations on that scenario, says Lochbaum, "it would exceed the radiation-dose limits set by Congress and scare people to death. But the NRC won't do it." The NRC's Taylor told TIME that the agency analyzes dose rates at the time a plant opens--when its pool is empty. The law, he said, "does not contain a provision for rereview."