Man can sue over failed imaging business with California reactor, NRC says

A man who threatened to sue the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the failure of a neutron imaging business can have his day in court if he wants it, the commission said late last week.

“Your claim did not reveal that you suffered any damage to or loss of property or personal injury or death caused by the negligent or wrongful act or omission of any employee of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission acting within the scope of their office or employment,” Marian Zober, NRC’s general counsel, wrote in a May 4 letter to David Slaughter, president of Aerotest Operations, San Ramon Calif.

“If you are dissatisfied with the NRC’ s determination , you may file suit in an appropriate U .S. District Court no later than 6 months after the date of mailing of this notification,” Zober wrote. NRC posted the letter online Friday.

Slaughter in April demanded that NRC pay Aerotest $2 million in cash in $3 million in credit to help get the 1960s-vintage 250-kilowatt Aerotest Radiography and Research Reactor (ARRR) back up and running. If the commission refused, Slaughter said, he would sue.

Slaughter, the former director of the University of Utah’s Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, has been trying to get NRC to reimburse Aerotest since 2019 for what he argued was the commission’s failure to prevent the destruction of the reactor’s fuel rods in 2012. Slaughter said the commission’s failures effectively left him holding the bag for a decommissioning project.

Slaughter bought ARRR and its commercial imaging business in 2017 from Stockholm, Sweden-based Autoliv, which in 2000 acquired the non-power-producing Training, Research, Isotopes, General Atomics- (TRIGA) type reactor. Such reactors can be used for neutron imaging: a means of seeing through solid objects in a way that is different from x-ray imaging.

Slaughter had not filed suit in any federal court as of Monday afternoon.