Interview with John Shannon Coogan, September 15, 2006

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with John S. Coogan September 15, 2006 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Leisl Carr © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with John Coogan September 15, 2006 Conducted by Leisl Carr Table of Contents Introduction: birth ( Northampton, MA, 1928), military service, education ( University of New Mexico, 1952), work for REECo at NTS ( hired 1954) 1 Offsite radiation exposure and involvement of U. S. Army and USPHS 2 Work with RADSAFE ( 1956) and transfer to USPHS ( 1961) 3 Instrumentation used by early RADSAFE, and requirement for film badges ( beginning 1957) 4 USPHS and offsite monitoring ( beginning 1961) 6 Studies at the University of New Mexico ( B. A., Business, 1952) 8 Relationship between USPHS ( later EPA) and UNLV 9 Offsite whole- body count program, including monitoring of Eskimos from Russian testing, and work with radiation complaints in the West 11 Advent of the EPA and changes in offsite programs 12 Impressions of Three Mile Island and how EPA and FEMA handled the accident 13 Shift in mission and focus between USPHS and EPA 14 Reflections on usefulness and safety of nuclear energy, including storage of fuel rods at Yucca Mountain 15 Thoughts on transition from USPHS to EPA to CEMP 17 Opinion on compensation for radiation exposure victims 19 Clearances, and work at Groom Lake ( Area 51) 20 Description of RADSAFE work for REECo ( 1956- 1961) 22 Experience of atmospheric test 23 Offsite monitoring training program for young professionals at NTS 24 Interesting offsite families in the Great Basin 24 CEMP and presenting information to the community 25 Conclusion: water rights issues in the West 26 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with John Coogan September 15, 2006 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Leisl Carr [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 2, Disc 1. John Coogan: My name is John Shannon Coogan. I was born in Northampton, Massachusetts on September 29, 1928. I migrated from several problems— a tour in the U. S. Marine Corps— to the University of New Mexico, which I graduated from in 1952. I was hired by Reynolds Electric [ Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Company, REECo] in Albuquerque [ New Mexico] and subsequently came to Nevada in December of 1954 to work at the Nevada Test Site [ NTS]. At that time I was involved in buying electrical equipment for the Nevada Test Site as we were getting ready for the 1955 series, the [ Operation] Teapot series. Basically, after that I evolved. Reynolds Electric at the time was a very small group and we were interested in expanding. Several of the things that they took over during this period of time, during the 1955- 56 era, was the feeding and housing at the Nevada Test Site. The feeding was under a fellow named Warren Boris The housing was under, oh, the fellow that owned Pogo’s bar [ Pogo’s Tavern] up here, Jim Holcombe. Leisl Carr: Pogo’s bar? Where was that located at? Pogo’s bar. It’s on Decatur Boulevard. Still? North Decatur. Yes, still. And he owned that bar and ran it for many, many years until he died, I think, last year. Also one of the people that you might— it’s prominently in the news here, is Jim Rogers. His father Frank Rogers was the assistant project director for Reynolds Electric at that time. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 One of the situations that had evolved at the test site concerning offsite radiation exposure was that in the early days of the Nevada Test Site, in the ’ 51 through the ’ 53 series, the U. S. Army was in charge of the radiation safety program both offsite and onsite. During one of these series there were several complaints from the offsite residents. One of the stories that remains is called the Ghost of Alamo, in which a RADSAFE [ radiological safety] personnel appeared in full NICs with his respirator and looked at his pencil dosimeter and told the people of Alamo, Well, I’ve got mine. It’s time to go, which of course greatly disturbed the people of Alamo. What did he mean by “ I’ve got mine, it’s time to go”? He got his exposure, his weekly or monthly exposure on the pencil dosimeter, and he said that he’s got mine, I’m ready to go. Basically this led to consternation by the offsite public, which opted for the closing of the Nevada Test Site. This was rectified by having the U. S. Public Health Service [ USPHS] come in and take over the functions in 1955, in part of 1953 and all of 1955. [ 00: 05: 00] One of the things that might be explained at this time, of course, is that in alternate years they used to test in the Pacific, and then they’d test here at the Nevada Test Site. Like in 1955 it was here; 1956 it was in the Pacific, in the Marshall Islands. The Public Health Service maintained people in the offsite communities and one of the things is we had people actually live there. Oh, I didn’t know that. And they lived there for the duration of the test series in these locations. What was the reasoning behind that? Mainly to make the people [ available] so that the populace could have someone to talk to them about radiation and where the test site were going and what the reason for testing was. Also UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 during this time, most of these people were district health officers from different states and personnel from Washington, D. C. and in the Public Health Service in Cincinnati, Ohio and other locations. Primarily they were all professional people. And what is the significance of them being professionals? Well, I think that the idea behind being professional people is that they knew how— they were experienced in dealing with people, and they knew the situation of the radiation. They had some knowledge of it beyond the basic training that you would get with Army personnel. So that started it. In 1956, Reynolds Electric was given the charge of taking over radiation safety, of which I was one of the original members. They still call this RADSAFE at that point. Yes. And you were one of the original members of RADSAFE. Yes. Wow! Can you tell me about that, what that was like? Well, basically what happened was we were forced into it because in 1956 there were some experiments, they had some trouble with some triggers, and they wanted to have a series of tests at the test site and we didn’t have anyone that was trained at that time. The Army had two people left out there. One was a fellow named Marshall Page who later was working for the Department of Energy [ DOE], and the other one was a fellow named William Wilkerson. In the Public Health Service there’s two gentlemen left: one was Oliver Placak and Dr. Melvin W. Carter. And Carter, by the way, is professor emeritus from Georgia Tech. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 And so basically what they did is they started, since I had had some training in radiac instrumentation, we formed a group in 1956, and with the help of the Public Health Service people, we managed to do both off- and- onsite radiation. And that was the start of the REECo RADSAFE group. And it sounds like it was always meant to be kind of a fusion with the Public Health Service. Am I correct in assuming that? Yes, that’s true. Basically it’s probably from this liaison that I eventually went with the Public Health Service, because they asked me several times to go down there and so in 1961 I did [ 00: 10: 00] transfer from Reynolds Electric to the U. S. Public Health Service. How did that go in the early days with RADSAFE? I think the two things people have to realize, one is it wasn’t until the 1960s that we developed anything that we could use in instrumentation besides vacuum tubes. At that time— Yeah, I gathered this. At that time, most of the instrumentation we had was not only heavy and bulky but it was very unreliable in certain instances. Can you describe some of it? Don James described a few pieces, but the early pieces must’ve been— could you really take them around with you? Oh yes, you could take them around with you but basically as I recall the basic gamma and beta monitor was something in a box that was probably, oh, twelve inches by four inches by six inches high and probably weighed in the order of twenty pounds, most of that being batteries. And it wasn’t until in the sixties that we developed the transistor, that you really got instrumentation that could do many, many things. For example, we used to have a 256- channel multi- channel analyzer which was fed on vacuum tubes, and probably every morning I’d UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 probably spend a half- an- hour at least changing tubes to get the darn thing up and running. And we could look at 256 channels of isotopes with varying degrees of accuracy. Today the same machine is in thousandths of— you can do thousands of functions with it, and I think the last one I looked at was like 2,000 functions. So, you know, you go on order of magnitude with detection. I think that two of the things that were— when we first looked at radiation, we looked at the long return of the isotopes such as the betas and the gammas and the alphas because we could see those. We couldn’t see some of the shorter- life isotopes such as the iodines and some of the precursors like tritiums and things like that we couldn’t see, because we didn’t have the instrumentation. So basically that’s about where we came from. I think that probably one of the fellows that you should contact is a fellow named Clifford Penwell. He was with REECo RADSAFE for a number of years in charge of their field operations. And he’s also a great storyteller. [ Mr. Penwell passed away in 2007]. That’s always a good thing. That’s my favorite part, is the stories. But that’s how we started, and of course we looked at the early days when the ’ 55, ’ 57 series, looking at the ’ 58 series, we’re looking at above- ground explosions. And then of course we did start in ’ 58, we did start looking at tunnel operations. In all of these situations we looked at the offsite problems. Interestingly enough, when we looked at onsite, Reynolds Electric of course had many, many— well, we had a great deal of resources. We had all the resources we could use, and we developed a system, you know, where— for example, one of the things we did was in 1957, everyone entering the Nevada Test Site had to have a film badge. Up until that time [ 00: 15: 00] it was not required. You were required to get one if you knew you were going into the area but many, many people did not. And of course this has led to, I think, many cases where UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 people are looking for compensation for radiation damage, which cannot be proven either one way or the other. That’s our main focus, I think, right now. The other thing is that, if I may skip ahead here a little bit, going to ’ 61 when we started the offsite [ program], when the Public Health Service— at that time, the draft was still on, and so we could get a number of young people graduating from college and have them serve two years in the Public Health Service in lieu of military service. And so we had a great cadre of young professional people that we could send into the offsite areas. We didn’t have people live there per se, but they would go out there and spend all week there and maybe come in on the weekends. And this, I think, having talked to Don James, I’m sure that he’s told you he has many, many friends out there. Yeah, quite a few. And if you talk to Chuck Costa he will tell you that he has many, many friends out there. And over the years, you know, there’s been a number of people that we’ve worked with and known that, well, we still consider our friends. In fact, I went out last year and toured the offsite area just to talk to some of the people. Can you tell me the geographic parameters of the offsite area, just so I can get a picture? What towns are we talking about? Well, mainly we’re talking about Tonopah, Ely, Austin, probably in Utah to a certain extent Cedar City, for example, St. George. Of course in that area you had a more hostile environment because people thought they’d been exposed, or I’m sorry, had been exposed. And then of course we had places in Kingman [ Arizona] that we’d visit, for example. The other thing that we did is we used college students every other summer to go out and inventory milk cows, dairy cows. And that was both the commercial dairies and the individual UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 family- owned cows. We did this throughout Nevada and Utah and parts of California and parts of Arizona. And I might say it was very successful and the students were very devoted. And of course what I did was send one man or employee with about six students and they went out and covered an area. Tremendous effort. Well, I think the students enjoyed it and it also provided us with a base in case anything did escape from the test site that we could immediately go to the dairies in the fallout area. And I don’t think, there’s over one or two instances where close in, like in Alamo, where we had to divert the milk. It was an effort. Well, this is the impression that I’m getting with doing a little research on the Public Health Service and the magnitude of the effort that went into being very thorough in this monitoring. Am I correct in assuming that? Yes, we thought we were. There’s always room for improvement. Anything you want to do, there’s always somebody who can come up with, why didn’t you do this? But no, we thought we were doing very, very interesting work. In fact, you know, this is involved and even today you have community monitoring stations which are run by the Desert Research Institute [ DRI] which has taken over the offsite program. They’re in places like Pahrump and Ely and [ 00: 20: 00] Tonopah and some of the ranches out in the area like Fallinis’ ranch at Warm Springs and Sharps’ ranch Blue Eagle. And there’s a number of things like this that are done that we consider that it’s a thorough effort. Probably if you ever have another, say, hopefully it never happens but say you ever had another nuclear holocaust or somebody in the world would blow up a nuclear bomb, one of the places that we probably could do a great deal of monitoring, in the western United States anyhow, is the Lightning Strike groups has five- mile grids throughout the western United States. They have stations so they can monitor the lightning strikes, and it looks to me like you could put radiation stations on those at the same time. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 [ At this point, Mr. Coogan’s wife Betty Jean enters the room and greetings are exchanged.] So, you know, I think that’s an option for what we’re talking about; that’s something that probably the resource that’s available right now that we haven’t seen any need to use right at the present moment. That’s an interesting observation that I’ve not heard anyone make before. I investigated it one time before I retired and it’s possible to do. When did you retire? When did I retire? Betty Jean Coogan: Nineteen eighty- seven. John Coogan: Oh, OK. It’s hard to remember these things. Betty Jean Coogan: But he’s never had to remember those things, you know, he always has somebody. That’s your job. I know how that goes. I’m recently engaged myself and watching after my fiancé as closely as I can. Well, let me take you back just a little bit. What did you study at the University of New Mexico? Did it relate to what you ended up doing? John Coogan: No, not really. I was going to become an electrical engineer, but then I got interrupted for a year in there, so I finally just got a bachelor’s degree in business to get out of there. My father had been an electrical contractor and I’d been an electrician before I went to college. And that’s the connection between you getting out of college and then REECo picking you up, because you already had those skills as an electrician? Well, yeah, and of course what I used to do is do a lot of estimating for jobs, for the cost, and of course that’s what REECo was interested in. And the fellow that hired me, his name was Joe UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 Lopez who at one time was the director up there at the test site for REECo, and he was an electrical engineer. And then you just came out to Nevada. You came from Albuquerque, so you have kind of a different impression of what it was like to come out to the Las Vegas area and the test site. What did you think when you got here? Was it any different than—? It was a very small town. Well, of course, I came out here first and then my wife joined me, I think, in January or February of the next year. We found an apartment on I believe it was on North 9th. It was the last thing out of town, there wasn’t anything below there. And there was a very small- town atmosphere. I guess the thing that didn’t impress me was the fact that, number one, we didn’t have libraries; a very small library downtown was all you had. There was no university; UNLV [ University of Nevada, Las Vegas] hadn’t been heard of. In fact, the Public Health Service of course has— well, the EPA [ U. S. Environmental Protection Agency] now has those buildings down on the university campus. Those were built in the sixties and that was [ 00: 25: 00] to aid UNLV to give them more impetus and to also turn some of those buildings back to them after a certain number of years, which I think they have. I haven’t followed that too close. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll have to look that up. Yes, I believe they’ve turned one or two buildings back to the university, which was the original intent for the government to build the buildings and then for them eventually to become university buildings. It sounds like a fairly symbiotic relationship between the Public Health Service, and later the EPA, and then the university, that they’re both trying to build each other up. Did the Public UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 Health Service have access to resources that were better because they were on the UNLV campus, or did it not matter? I don’t think it mattered too much. Well, we used several of the resources. One, I used a number of the students. Right, right, I didn’t know that. And even during the school year, see, we had a program where you could use students twenty hours a week. They still have that program. And that’s a great program for both parties. In fact, one of the gals I had down there, she was a secretary for me for�� because I kept running out of them, and she now works for the Water District as a senior engineer. Really! That’s fabulous. It sounds like, then, it’s sort of a grow- your- own kind of program where the university provides the— Oh sure, and there should be more of that, really, because that’s an interesting and beneficial relationship, I think, for both parties. And of course the other thing is that in working with the Public Health Service, one of the problems that you run into is that it’s hard to find professional people that want to work in this kind of an environment. It’s very difficult at times and at times, you spend a lot of time away from your families and away from home. Probably you can talk to Don James, but I bet I can safely say that half to two- thirds of his time was spent away from his home. He said that. Not quite three- quarters but two- thirds, he was gone from his family. Did you have the same phenomenon? Were you gone a lot? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 Yes, I was. Well, see, one of the things we also did in the offsite program was we had a program where we had what we called the whole- body counter. We took people into a chamber and looked at the internal isotopes that were generated in their body. We picked people in the offsite community and brought them in, and we did this for a number of years, primarily [ with] some of the ranchers. Well, one of the fellows I can remember from Ely was a garage owner; he owned a service station up there. And you know we looked at all these people to see if we could find anything internal. Just visit. One of the things I did was track Eskimos for a number of years. Oh, from the tests up in Alaska? From the Russians. From the Russians? You guys were doing monitoring from the Russian testing? Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. Can you tell me more about that? Well, basically what happened was, there was the Russians— if you look at the map where the Russian atomic testing is, to some of the, like Point Hope in Alaska is one of the villages up there, is only like twenty miles across the Bering Sea. I mean not the Bering Sea but across the ocean there. And so what you had was the fallout that was deposited in the lichen. [ 00: 30: 00] Lichen is a plant that absorbs its nutrients from the air, not from the ground. Then you have the caribou which feed on the lichens. Then you have the Eskimo that feeds on the caribou. So that’s what we looked at. We couldn’t do a complete, whole- body thing but we did a shadow shield where you had a person bend over and you had a four- inch crystal looking at their stomach. We did that for a number of years and we followed a number of families up there. And did you publish your findings? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 Yes, they’re published somewhere. I don’t know where, but they’re published, yes. DOE has a website called Open Net and I’ve been kind of searching for some of your publications. When I find them, I can burn you a disc and mail them off if you like. I might, I don’t know. I donated a bunch of my papers to the Atomic Testing Museum. Oh, OK. That’s actually good to know. But I don’t know what they’ve done with them. They’re in the archives. If you donated them, they’re probably in the archives. That’s good to know. OK. And then I also used to travel with a medical doctor and he did the medical side and I did the physical investigation of people who had complaints, radiation complaints throughout the West here. Beginning how early? Oh, that probably started in the sixties when I was with them, and then continued on until we changed to EPA. When the EPA came in, we lost a lot of this, you know, because they weren’t interested and the EPA wanted a different direction. Really! I didn’t know that. Can you— Well, EPA is a very highly political organization, and they want to do everything that’s popular. They don’t want, you know, something like we’re talking about. What I’m talking about, following families and everything, that’s a long- term study before you ever develop anything. And you know your stats and that are under question at all times; you really don’t know what you’re getting into until— so. And the Environmental Protection Agency, while they were interested in keeping up the offsite program as such from the testing standpoint, but beyond that, as far as doing anything in Alaska, they weren’t interested. They discontinued that. We had, I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 guess, a few complaints from local citizens after that but, you know, that was not the number we had before, and so I don’t know. I guess to say that on the record or off the record, EPA was not my favorite organization. Fair enough. Did you go through that transition then when the EPA took over the Public Health Service? And remind me what year that was. I don’t remember. I don’t know when they took over, ’ 80 I think or something like that. I’m not sure anymore. OK. Did you end up working for the EPA? Oh yeah, sure. And don’t get me wrong, we had certain things like we did go to Three Mile Island. You went to Three Mile Island? Oh yes. Wow. I remember that date. That’s 1979, about? Somewhere in there. What did you think when you went there? I thought we were making a great big deal out of nothing. Actually if you look at it and look at the reactor, everything held the way it was supposed to hold. There wasn’t any release of any significant amounts of radiation. There was some short- term, low- level gaseous isotopes released in very small amounts. I thought we handled it very poorly. No, the thing I saw there that really I thought bothered me more than anything was the fact that the local people were [ 00: 35: 00] not involved in what was going on. So one of the things we did was we took the local police departments and the fire departments and gave them some portable instruments and told them how, gave them a short course on how they worked. We said when you’re patrolling or whatever you’re doing, would you please record these for us? And that really didn’t get us much as far as UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 the information but I thought it quelled the populace from thinking that they were withheld from all information. And I guess I thought there the bureaucracy was in full swing. I have a few other complaints but one of my main complaints is against FEMA [ Federal Emergency Management Administration] and I thought that they did a lousy job. I’m sorry, that’s my opinion. Oh, don’t apologize to me. This is all before— Yes. I think that FEMA— well, I think it probably has been out right now, but they were a very ineffective organization. I was down in Florida with them on a reactor site down there and they also didn’t perform, I thought, very well. Well then, this poses an interesting situation because you have the Public Health Service, who you worked for before, and they had one orientation, one attitude, and then you have these other government bureaucracies that have another orientation, another attitude. What exactly was that shift? Can you explain that? Well, I’m not sure I can explain it except that the EPA, for example, is more interested in clean air and clean water than many other things. So that was the focus that they took and that was the main focus of the program. You still had, somewhat, the radiation offsite program over here, but it became a secondary focus rather than the primary focus. And it went down from there. Do you think that it was because the tests went underground? I’m just speculating if you can’t say. No, the tests were underground and as years went by, you know, we perfected a number of things. The containment process? The containment and also the depth of burial and things of this nature which made it less obvious that you were going to have any release of radioactivity. For example, when you go on a tour of UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 the test site, there’ll be an area they’ll take you out to, one of their famous, of course, experiments is project Sedan which was a Plowshare, peaceful use of nuclear energy- type experiment. They were going to blow a new Panama Canal is what they were going to do. As an offsite [ monitor] for that, I can say that they didn’t move a lot of dirt; however, the dust cloud and everything, they had to turn on the street lights in the city of Ely at four o’clock in the afternoon on an July day because of the dust from the Sedan shot. But what I started to say was that also in this area you’ll see an area where they still have it contaminated, where the ground is still contaminated, and it’s from a tower shot that they had in the 1957 series. It’s still a contaminated area [ Area 9] which we do nothing with. Other than that, you know, I guess I’m a great believer in nuclear energy. I think it’s safe. I think you can use it safely. I think you have to look at a number of things. I look at a [ 00: 40: 00] controversy like Yucca Mountain and I think we have put this in the wrong perspective. What we should say up there is that you’re storing nuclear fuel rods for future use, and you should compare it to something like Fort Knox [ Kentucky]. Now maybe this is a strange thing for me to say but you know if you look at this, in our country we haven’t built a reactor in twenty years. We still have some 20 percent of our power produced by nuclear reactors. If you look ahead twenty more years, you’re going to have to have 40 percent more power than you have right now, from all sources, not just electric but gasoline and everything else, just from projections, that’s what they’re projecting. We have taken from the Russians a number of nuclear weapons and in South Carolina converted them to fuel rods. There’s a book out called The World is Flat which is interesting because the focus is on the fact countries are becoming international and want the same amenities such as autos, clothing, food, etc. That’s a great title. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 16 One of the things that you have to look at is that, for example, Japan is almost all nuclear right now. So is France. China has five reactors that are being built in this country to be sent to China. India has three reactors. You’re going to have to look at nuclear somewhere along the line. We talk about alternate sources like wind farms, wind chargers, and also, you know, solar panels. The thing that’s wrong there is you have to look at the amount of space, lands that it would take to produce the amount of energy [ as opposed to what] it would take to use one reactor. So that’s my argument. Sounds good. So I think that what we should do is we should turn around Yucca Mountain as a dump site and say it’s a Fort Knox; it’s just a storage place for nuclear fuel rods that can be reprocessed. You get 93 percent back that’s reusable from the fuel rod, so you should take that and use this as a Fort Knox so that you have this supply of nuclear fuel available to you. Now as someone who monitored radiation offsite and onsite, you don’t see an issue with that site being contaminated? Because I’m not sure I understand how to keep it from being contaminated. I’m showing my ignorance here. You’re going to have to explain it to me. OK, let me go back. In 1978 there was an experiment performed at the Nevada Test Site where they stored fuel rods in a tunnel, and they have all the results of that and from that they had thermal measurements and radiation measurements and almost anything that you wanted. And the experiment was successful. So it can be done. Basically the real problem with the storage of fuel rods that you have to be careful of is heat, not radiation. It’s thermal heat. So if the rods are clanned, which they are when you get them, reused rods, and they can be stored separately enough so that t