Nevada lawmakers: Nuke transport trucks would be inviting targets

Mary Manning and Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001 | 10:04 a.m.

Trucks and trains hauling nuclear waste cross-country to the proposed Yucca Mountain waste burial site would be attractive bomb targets -- or vehicles -- for suicidal terrorists, Nevada lawmakers in Congress said.

The Department of Energy has failed to assess terrorist threats to shipping the highly radioactive material to Yucca Mountain, they said.

In the wake of terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Nevada lawmakers this week are generating a new wave of criticism about the plan to ship waste to Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The plan should be shelved until the risk to transportation routes and the site itself is thoroughly examined, they said.

Yucca Mountain is the proposed burial ground for the nation's high-level nuclear waste, a first-of-its-kind underground repository.

The lawmakers, who have always opposed the Yucca plan, said the terrorism risk seems too great to construct the waste site, given lack of DOE study of terrorism risks and tragic proof this month that a sizeable group of terrorists can pull off large-scale, coordinated attacks.

Lawmakers took note Tuesday when Attorney General John Ashcroft told a congressional panel that 20 people have been charged with fraudulently obtaining driver's licenses to haul hazardous waste, including some who may have links to terrorists.

If Yucca were completed, up to 100,000 truck and train shipments over decades would haul waste cross-country to the Yucca site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"(Nuclear waste) simply cannot be transported safely," Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in an online chat with Nevada residents, "and the terrorists know this."

"Terrorists know the type of devastation a nuclear waste train wreck can cause," Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., said. "Now it is time for the Department of Energy to inform the American public and prevent such a disaster."

The DOE is finalizing studies of the site and is expected this year or next to recommend whether it is safe to entomb 77,000 tons of highly radioactive material there.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said, "Yucca Mountain at this time would only give certain terrorist organizations another target to examine."

As Yucca manager, the DOE is responsible for analyzing potential terrorist threats to the site -- and to thousands of trucks and trains that for decades would ship waste to the mountain.

After the terrorist attacks, the DOE decided to review security plans for all its facilities, DOE officials said.

"We are in the process of reassessing our assumptions and analysis for these kinds of terrorist attacks," Gayle Fisher, spokeswoman for DOE's Yucca Mountain project, said.

The attacks could change how the DOE plans to protect the desert mountain site, although it is not clear what kinds of changes would be made, said Abe Van Luik, DOE's senior policy adviser for the Yucca project.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the DOE has not had discussions regarding terrorists attacks with either the NRC or the U.S. Department of Transportation, DOE's Van Luik said. But he stressed new security guidelines involving the storage and transportation of nuclear waste are expected.

The DOE last considered the issue as part of the Yucca draft environmental impact statement, which was released in 1999.

The DOE report recognized that waste shipping casks were vulnerable to high explosives. But the report did not address a worst-case scenario in which a missile or even an airplane smashes a waste container or rips a hole in one, releasing radiation.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said, "Right now, let's just store the stuff on site in dry cask storage where it is. Why risk the transportation issue? We have to have a completely new paradigm shift in the way these shipments are looked at. The worst-case scenario just got worse."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also has not addressed potential terrorist threats to Yucca or transportation routes, despite requests two years ago from the Nevada attorney general's office.

The NRC will be responsible for analyzing the DOE's Yucca proposal. The NRC would license and regulate the dump site if it is constructed.

In June 1999 Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa asked the NRC to consider terrorism risks at Yucca Mountain.

Del Papa's office argued that the commission had not assessed terrorist threats to nuclear power plants since 1984.

Nor had there been a thorough review of terrorist threats along waste transportation routes to Nevada, Deputy Attorney General Marta Adams said.

The attorney general awaits NRC response.

NRC Chairman Richard Meserve ordered staff to review security plans at all nuclear facilities licensed by the commission.