Following Pilgrim’s 2015 refueling outage, and after placing fuel assemblies in three dry casks earlier this year, Pilgrim now has 3,162 assemblies in its spent fuel pool.

Pilgrim’s pool was designed to store 880 fuel assemblies, each assembly containing many fuel rods (aka: nuclear waste). Read this blog, Spent Fuel and the Dangers at Pilgrim, to learn more about why an overcrowded spent fuel pool is so dangerous.

Because reprocessing was banned by President Carter and there is no offsite national repository as planned (most recently, Yucca Mountain fell through in 2010), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) gave Pilgrim approval to store 3,859 assemblies in the same place via a license amendment, June 22, 1994.