Mock nuke waste haul en route to Yucca

Benjamin Grove

Monday, July 10, 2000 | 11:07 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A mock nuclear waste cask is rumbling along the highways of America this month to draw attention to the dangers of hauling high-level radioactive material.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington group of watchdog activists, launched the "Radioactive Roads and Rails" tour in Michigan July 3. The truck, carrying a mock 20-foot-by-8-foot cask, will end its trip by Aug. 6 at Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The Department of Energy is studying Yucca as a permanent site for the nation's nuclear waste, ultimately 77,000 tons of it. If the Yucca plan is approved, the waste now stored at nuclear power plants nationwide would be carried by truck and train through 43 states to Nevada.

"The message is that when it comes to high-level nuclear waste, we all live in Nevada," activist Kevin Kamps said in a telephone interview from Indianapolis.

Nuclear energy officials say the trip is "fear-mongering at its finest." More than 2,900 shipments of high-level nuclear waste have been made safely in the past 36 years -- with fewer than 10 accidents, they say. No radioactivity was released in the accidents, officials say.

The Nuclear Information and Resource Service "can make their assertions easily by ignoring 30 years of history," said Steve Kerekes, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, a group funded by the nuclear power industry. "The fact is that there has not been a release of radioactivity precisely because the containers are designed to withstand an accident that is in excess of whatever can be imagined on a highway."

Waste transport containers have been tested in 30-foot falls on unyielding surfaces, burned at 1,475 degrees for 30 minutes and submerged in 50 feet of water for eight hours, officials say.

"It's not like they are hauling plastic containers of milk," Kerekes said. "These are robust containers."

But activists say that if Yucca opens, an estimated 100,000 shipments of Department of Defense and nuclear power plant waste will pass within a mile of 50 million people, near schools, businesses and homes. A tragic accident is inevitable, they say.

The activist group's mock cask is draped with a banner reading, "Where is Paul Revere when you need him? The atomic trains are coming! The atomic trains are coming!" The cask is being pulled on a trailer behind a pickup driven by Kamps.

The group's officials on an eight-state tour plan to meet with emergency response officials, city council members, business people, college groups, interested citizens -- even Chicago area toll booth operators who would take money from 36,300 truck drivers hauling waste, Kamps said.

The truck was in a Fourth of July parade in Evanston, Ill. Kamps also said he passed out fliers to people stuck in a traffic jam in the Chicago area.

"I told them they would have been subject to the radiation equivalent of two chest X-rays," Kamps said. "People are pretty interested to learn that kind of thing, things being downplayed by the DOE."