[1][2] The unsafe procedures meant that spent fuel rod pools at Unit 1 had the potential to boil, possibly releasing radioactive steam throughout the plant.
But in the 1990s Galatis realized that Millstone was routinely performing "full-core off-loads", moving all the hot fuel into the spent-fuel pool.
[1] In addition, the Millstone 1 routine ignored the mandated 250-hour cool-down period before a full core off-load, and sometimes the fuel was moved just 65 hours after shutdown, a violation that melted the boots of one worker.
By sidestepping the safety requirements in this way, Millstone saved about two weeks of downtime for each reactor refueling—during which Northeast Utilities had to pay $500,000 a day for replacement power.
The petitioners maintained that during normal refueling outages at Millstone Unit 1, NU offloaded the entire fuel core.