A man who tried to resurrect commercial imaging services at a shuttered, 1960s-vintage reactor recently threatened to sue the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for allegedly ruining his business plans.
In a letter to NRC, David Slaughter, the current president of Aerotest Operations in San Ramon, Calif., said he wanted to restart the imaging business in 2018 but that the cost to repair the 250-kilowatt Aerotest Radiography and Research Reactor (ARRR) was much higher than he expected before his company acquired the reactor, and its NRC license, in 2017.
Slaughter laid the blame for those alleged expenses at the commission’s feet in a 17-page letter to Marian Zobler, NRC’s deputy general counsel. In the letter, published by NRC on Tuesday and dated March 29, Slaughter claimed Aerotest had suffered damages or more than $9.8 million but was “willing to settle this dispute out of court for $2,000,000 in cash to assist in the purchase of fuel elements and $3,000,000 in NRC Credits for their future work if settled by June 30, 2023.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission “is considering the matter,” a spokesperson wrote Wednesday in an email, “and will respond directly to Aerotest.”
Aerotest, under Slaughter, has sought financial reimbursement from NRC since 2019 for what Slaughter characterized as the agency’s failure to recognize damage to 22 of ARRR’s fuel elements, which were rendered inoperable in 2012 when their outer coating, or cladding, cracked. Slaughter attributed the cracked cladding to the actions of his predecessors at Aerotest.
NRC in 2021 denied Aeortest’s request for reimbursement.
A Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics (TRIGA) reactor first licensed in 1965 and operated by Aerotest afterward by Slaughter’s predecessors, ARRR could be used for neutron imaging: a means of seeing through solid objects that is similar to, but distinct from, x-ray imaging.
Companies in the aerospace industry, among others, sometimes pay for neutron imaging.
Slaughter, the former director of the University of Utah’s Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, became president of Aerotest after his business, Nuclear Labyrinth, acquired Aerojet and assumed control of the NRC license for the non-power-generating ARRR on July 17, 2017, after a protracted NRC-mandated effort to free the reactor from foreign control, Aerotest reported to the NRC.
By the time the acquisition closed, the General Atomics-built ARRR had been shut down for about seven years and defueled for five, according to NRC correspondence with Slaughter from 2018.
Editor’s note, April 13, 2023, 10:22 a.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to include the correct spelling of Marian Zobler’s name.
