Nuke cask test questioned

Erin Neff and Benjamin Grove

Friday, April 5, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission official said this week that his agency has limited information on the safety of nuclear waste casks, giving Nevada officials more ammunition in their fight against a nuclear waste repository.

According to a letter sent Tuesday to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., NRC officials test scale models of casks and "cask impact limiters" -- the materials used to protect the cask body during a collision.

The letter from Richard Meserve of the NRC in response to questions from Reid showed that the NRC has not conducted tests on full-scale cask models or physically test casks for damage by fire.

The NRC, which is responsible for regulating the nuclear industry, said those tests were performed by computer simulation.

"I'm shocked," said Reid, who is chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NRC. "The NRC is relying on small-scale tests of model truck and train containers."

Nevada officials are fighting the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, which is 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, by arguing that the transportation of nuclear waste is dangerous.

The issue over testing waste transportation casks has come under fire by state leaders who question the testing of the casks. The NRC's computer tests support nuclear industry arguments that say transporting nuclear waste is safe.

But state leaders point to physical tests that show a cask could be vulnerable to a missile attack, and they say the casks could be penetrated or cracked in an accident or terrorists attack and release radioactive material.

State leaders say they hope the message resonates in Congress, which will vote on the Yucca project in the next few months.

"Who would buy a car that had only been crash tested on a computer screen or on a model racetrack?" Reid asked.

Nuclear industry officials stressed that full-scale model tests likely would only serve a public relations purpose, not a scientific one.

"It has been proven that computer modeling is sufficient," said Jack Edlow, president of Edlow International Co., a waste cask manufacturer.

NRC officials have said they already have a deep understanding of how casks would perform in an accident from tests dating to the late 1970s at Sandia National Laboratories, plus modern computer modeling.

NRC officials are planning more computer modeling and are considering a new round of physical tests, possibly full-scale tests, on waste containers in the next few years, NRC spokeswoman Rosetta Virgilio said. She said a final report on the new analysis may be complete by 2005, when Yucca Mountain could be well on its way to becoming the nation's nuclear waste repository.

"That's what this whole study is about -- to make sure that these containers are robust," Virgilio said. "It's a work in progress."

Nuclear industry officials say the test of time has proven casks safe, after thousands of shipments worldwide over millions of miles -- with no radiation leaks.

"Internationally, more (spent nuclear) fuel has already been safely and successfully transported than is scheduled to be shipped to Yucca Mountain," Edlow said. "Spent fuel has and will be shipped in robust, state-of-the-art Nuclear Regulatory Commission-certified containers with tons of steel and radiation shielding."

The NRC has overseen cask tests involving crashes and fires in field tests years ago at Sandia in New Mexico, which proved that the casks are safe for waste transport, Sandia scientists said. But more recent tests have been simulated.

Nevada officials say that recently released video footage of a 1998 test -- arranged by a private company, not the government -- call into question the government's plan to transport nuclear waste across the country to Nevada. The test conducted at the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground shows an anti-tank missile penetrating an iron cask wall.

"It just goes to show that the NRC isn't using real-world tests for real world scenarios," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said.

Critics discredit the video mostly because it featured an iron cask, not the steel models that are licensed for use in the United States.

Last month Reid requested information from the NRC about which containers are used to transport spent nuclear fuel by rail and road, and which tests are conducted on the containers.

In an April 2 response to Reid, the NRC's Meserve supplied a table of the physical tests conducted on the casks. The table shows no tests have been conducted on the full-size containers intended to transport the waste across the country to the proposed dump at Yucca Mountain.

Ensign said last July's tunnel fire in Baltimore -- in which a train car carrying 12,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid derailed and burned for days -- is a prime example of why physical testing should be done on all full-size materials.

The NRC's letter states:

Reid notes that the Baltimore fire burned at 1,500 degrees for several days.