Carson citizens express concerns about nuclear shipments

Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2000 | 11:17 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- As a full-sized mock nuclear waste canister rolled through Chicago, St. Louis and other cities on its way to Nevada recently, it prompted tough questions from citizens along the way, a scientific panel learned Tuesday.

In one city, a pregnant woman who had small children with her learned that she would have been exposed to radiation equal to three chest X-rays if she had been stuck in traffic next to a real canister carrying high-level nuclear waste heading to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The woman, who sat in a traffic jam next to the empty model container for three hours, asked Kevin Kamps of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an information clearinghouse in Washington, D.C., why she had not heard about the Department of Energy's plans for dumping the radioactive material in Nevada.

The independent Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, meeting in Carson City Tuesday and today, heard comments from people ranging from parents to truck drivers who had never thought about radiation exposure in their homes, vehicles and businesses along road and rail routes, Kamps said.

State troopers from Michigan to Nevada told Kamps they are concerned about shipments that could start as soon as 2010 -- if Yucca is licensed -- because they do not have the training for handling a nuclear accident.

The empty nuclear waste container is due to arrive in Las Vegas on Friday.

The DOE has not announced formal nuclear waste routes to Yucca, so no one is certain where the trucks and trains will go.

And, after a presentation by scientists hired by Nevada officials, the DOE admitted it had not tested Yucca's water for chemicals such as lead, arsenic and mercury. Those common metals in water flowing through Yucca corroded the alloy C-22 in a laboratory experiment. The alloy has been touted by the DOE as the best material to contain nuclear wastes from commercial reactors and defense weapons buried 1,000-feet deep inside Yucca.

Chemistry professor Aaron Barkatt of Catholic University of America, a consultant hired by the state Agency for Nuclear Projects, said that in one test with lead and water high in acid the 3/4-inch-thick sample of the DOE's preferred alloy corroded in a week and cracked in less than a month.

He called the DOE's choice of metal "a leap of faith" without enough experiments to test basic conditions of the mountain and its water.

Barkatt, Jeffrey Gorman of Dominion Engineering Inc. of Virginia and Roger Staehle, an adjunct chemical professor at the University of Minnesota, are asking for funds for a three-year study on basic minerals, temperature ranges and the reaction of Yucca's rock to the acidic water.

DOE Director Robert Loux said he was willing to fund the work. Both House and Senate versions of the DOE's 2001 budget, while differing by more than $100 million in total for DOE studies, agreed to give the state $2.5 million for scientific research, he said. The scientists and the state are negotiating on a price tag.

The trio of scientists based their initial study on what happens to metals inside nuclear reactors and power plants.

In similar conditions with water near boiling temperatures and containing acids and metals, the nuclear industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to replace cracked pipes and valves, Gorman said. Those industry parts were expected to last up to 60 years, he noted.

But the nuclear industry never tested for such unexpected failures in real life, Gorman said.

The DOE has started some tests using acidic water, Mark Peters of Los Alamos National Laboratory, said. "The project needs to address this. I don't deny that," he said.