MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – Two highly radioactive pieces of spent nuclear fuel were found Tuesday where they belong, in the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant’s spent fuel pool, three months after they were reported missing.

The discovery was made by engineers using a special tool to open a container in the pool, which houses thousands of spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the plant, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman said.

Two earlier robotic searches of the pool had failed to turn up the container. Its existence became known last week, when Entergy investigators found a record at a General Electric laboratory in California that the container had been shipped to Vermont Yankee sometime during the 1980s.

“We earlier had checked all the containers in the pool, but when we learned that General Electric had designed and sent a pipe-like cylinder for the fuel-rod pieces, we rechecked the videotapes,” said Jay Thayer, Entergy’s site vice president in charge of the Vermont Yankee plant.

“That’s when we noticed that what was previously thought to be part of an existing in-pool structure could very well be the canister that GE sent here,” he added.

News that the radioactive spent fuel segments, likely lethal to anyone exposed to them, were unaccounted for came during a refueling outage at Vermont’s lone nuclear plant in April, and was greeted with alarm by state and federal officials.

And it came at a sensitive time for the 32-year-old reactor, which has a request to boost its power output by 20 percent pending now before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Neil Sheehan, spokesman for the NRC’s Northeast regional office, said the agency was withholding judgment on the latest developments at the Vermont plant.

“It would absolutely be good news if this is in fact the missing fuel,” Sheehan said. “This is not material that should be unaccounted for and certainly should not be anywhere in the public domain.”

The discovery of the GE records prompted engineers at Vermont Yankee to design and build a new robotic tool that could go into the spent fuel pool, open the container and check its contents.

“Our search team designed a detailed search plan that explored every possibility from three different angles,” Thayer said. “They looked visually with the cameras, they searched the documents, and they talked to people who were on the scene 25 years ago,” when the fuel pieces had last been accounted for. “They deserve a tremendous amount of credit,” he added.

The container was described as a 40-inch-long cylinder about four inches across – easily large enough to hold the two fuel pieces, described as 9 and 17 inches long and about as thick as a pencil.

After the announcement that the fuel segments were missing in April, plant officials said they believed that the missing fuel segments were in cylinders welded to a bucket at the bottom of the 40-foot-deep spent fuel pool.

Raymond Shadis of the nuclear watchdog group New England coalition said Tuesday that the discovery of the fuel rods in a separate cylinder raised questions about what had been in the bucket and what had become of it.

“The burning question is what was in there (the bucket)?” Shadis said. “These kinds of open questions, they don’t give anyone any feeling of security with respect to how they handle spent nuclear materials.”

Vermont Yankee spokesman Robert Williams said discussions about the fuel having been in the bucket were “speculation early in the investigation.”

“We’ve done a thorough search of the pool and this completes the inventory,” Williams said. “These were the only segments that were not accounted for.”

The NRC’s Sheehan said his agency planned to launch its investigation when Vermont Yankee declared its own finished. Asked whether Vermont Yankee should have had a receipt record to match GE’s shipping record on the cylinder where the material was found, he said, “It’s still an unanswered question whether their records should have noted that they received this” container from GE.

AP-ES-07-13-04 2001EDT