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'CAT scan' spent-fuel claim still on Valar's site; no supporting calculation or correction found there

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2026-09 · safe-026 · Valar Atomics, Isaiah Taylor

Valar's April 2025 lawsuit post, still online in late September 2026, says its analysis indicates that holding spent fuel from its 100 kWt 'Ward One' test reactor (planned life under a month) for five minutes gives radiation exposure equal to a CAT scan. Valar's Ward 250 safety paper, the NSDA, credits reactor shielding that 'cannot be inadvertently defeated', analyzes fuel-handling accidents, and plans defueling into storage; DOE's categorical exclusion has the spent core leave in dry storage casks. No Valar correction or published calculation was found on Valar's website as of late September 2026. For scale: a CT scan is about 1 to 10 millisieverts (FDA), so five minutes would need 12 to 120 millisieverts an hour; the post gives no amount of fuel, cooling time, distance or shielding.

In plain termsUsed reactor fuel is radioactive; how much depends on the reactor's power, how long it ran and how long the fuel has cooled. Valar said holding used fuel from its planned Ward One test reactor for five minutes would be like one hospital CT scan. No calculation supporting it was found on its website, where the claim remains. For Ward 250, its own safety paper treats radiation shielding as a safety function, and DOE's review has the used fuel leave in dry storage casks.
verified 2026-10-02: Re-read Valar's 7 April 2025 post in late September 2026: the five-minute CAT-scan sentence is still on the page, with no correction or supporting calculation. Corrected in late September 2026: added the CT-scan dose-rate scale; removed a quoted phrase that was not Valar's wording. Corrected 30 Sept 2026: reworded the headline, detail and plain-language text to rest on government and company documents; a news citation was removed; now also cites the U.S. Energy Information Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Nuclear Energy.

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