The Nuclear Regulatory Commission repeatedly failed to ensure the safety of test reactors across the country, including at a government agency in Maryland and a shuttered imaging facility in California whose owner had complained of lax commission oversight, according to a recent report from the agency’s Inspector General.
The Inspector General uncovered the lapses by NRC personnel, including failures to directly observe the refueling and defueling of reactors, after opening an investigation in 2021 into a partially melted fuel rod at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Reactor in Gaithersburg, Md.
After beginning its inquiry into the 2021 incident in Maryland, the Inspector General decided to broaden its investigation “to include consideration of the NRC’s oversight of other Research and Test Reactor facilities to assess potential systemic issues,” according to the Sept. 29 report.
Among the other reactors called out specifically in the Inspector General’s report is the Aerotest Radiography and Research Reactor in San Ramon, Calif. The owner of the Aerotest reactor, David Slaughter, has threatened to sue the NRC for allegedly ruining the neutron-imaging business he planned to build around the 1960s-vintage Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics (TRIGA) reactor.
A company owned by Slaughter bought the Aerotest reactor in 2017. Slaughter later alleged that mistakes by the reactor’s previous owner, a foreign-domeciled company that acquired the facility in 2000, led to cracked fuel rods that rendered the reactor essentially useless in 2012.
Slaughter said that NRC never caught his predecessor’s mistakes and demanded nearly $10 million from the commission, which he has said he would sue to get. NRC refused to turn over the money.
The NRC Inspector General, in its September report, said that from 2000 to 2010 “NRC biennial inspections of Aerotest were inadequate. Specifically, the NRC did not perform direct observation of fuel movement and failed to adequately conduct oversight activities related to damaged fuel.”
According to the report, an NRC employee “was never able to be there [at Aerotest] during an inspection of the fuel” but did “look at the records” of fuel movements at the reactor.
In 2022, Aerotest Operations Inc., filed notice with the NRC that it would decommission its reactor. Neither Slaughter nor any of the companies involved with his takeover of Aerotest had filed suit in federal court as of Thursday morning.
