Columnist Benjamin Grove: Stressing the danger of shipping waste

Benjamin Grove

Friday, March 22, 2002 | 4:55 a.m.

IT READS LIKE a Hollywood script: three or more terrorists fire a small missile at a truck or train hauling nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The rogue commandos manage to hit their target, and an explosion rips a hole in the steel waste container.

In the wake of Sept. 11 and with a vote on Yucca Mountain looming in Congress in a few months, Nevada officials say that scenario is among their top arguments against the Yucca project, a federal plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

On the other side of the debate, nuclear industry officials argue that it is extremely unlikely terrorists would go after a nuclear waste container -- and even more unlikely that they could successfully hit it.

Caught in this predictable crossfire are two unanswered questions.

If terrorists somehow managed to pull off a missile strike, how much damage would it really do to the environment and human lives?

And what are government regulators doing about the threat?

Nevada lawmakers, led by Rep. Shelley Berkley, last week unveiled a 4.5-minute videotape that shows a 1998 test at Aberdeen Proving Ground in which a TOW missile blows a softball-sized hole in a nuclear waste container. The damaged cask raises serious questions about how easily terrorists could uncork deadly radiation, Berkley said.

The cast-iron container, called a Castor V/21, is not licensed for waste shipping in this country, although it is similar in strength to licensed containers, say consultants hired by Nevada. Nuclear industry experts strongly disagree, saying modern steel containers are far stronger than the iron Castor. They say the Aberdeen test is deeply flawed and proves nothing.

The Aberdeen test was not a government-sponsored scientific experiment -- it was arranged by a private company, International Fuel Containers, Ltd., as a promotional demonstration for a concrete waste container "flak jacket."

To find the most recent -- the only -- full-scale, documented and scientific government test you have to go back to 1982 at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. The federal government has long reported that a missile would do little damage to a nuclear waste container based on data from that single, 20-year-old test.

The test came about after Sandia scientists as early as 1977 began making rough calculations of how many people could be sickened or killed by radiation leaked from a damaged cask.

By 1982 Sandia scientists were spurred to conduct the real-world test after they "scared the bejesus out of themselves" with their early estimates, consultant and retired Sandia scientist Bob Luna told me. One estimate reached into the thousands.

So scientists attached a standard U.S. Army M3A1 explosive to an actual General Electric IF-200, 25-ton cask filled with non-radioactive uranium rods, and detonated it.

The blast put a hole six inches in diameter in the cask, spewing 3 grams -- 0.1 ounces -- of "respirable" particles into a cloud in the air, subject to whims of the weather. The explosion also blew 5.6 pounds of solid uranium material out of the cask -- about 1 percent of the uranium inside the cask, Sandia scientists said.

If the uranium had been real waste from a nuclear reactor, both the cloud and the solid material would have been highly radioactive.

But the release of such a small amount of material, even in heavily populated Manhattan, would cause no immediate fatalities, Sandia scientists concluded in the 99-page 1983 report about the test. The report said the blast could result in two to seven possible "latent cancer fatalities" -- people who got sick and died later.

Little study and no new government tests have been done since 1983, and none are planned. However, Sandia scientists in 1999 used the 1982 test data to recalculate what would happen if a range of weapons were used against a modern-day General Atomics cask. The initial results of the improved study were largely the same: very few fatalities.

But scientists have further studied the data and in follow-up reports concluded the number of estimated fatalities could be as high as 48, said Bob Halstead, a Wisconsin waste shipping expert hired by the state of Nevada.

Even that number may be low, Halstead said. He calculated more startling figures: 115 to 165 possible fatalities. Those numbers would be perhaps 10 times higher if a missile went all the way through the cask.

State analysts have criticized Sandia's data for not adequately considering all weather factors or how dangerous the spilled solid uranium could be.

"I think they are cooking their numbers here," Halstead said.

Nevada officials for years have goaded the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates nuclear waste containers, to re-examine sabotage threats to the containers. The state formally requested a new NRC analysis in 1999, but has gotten no response.

The NRC does not require that casks be designed to withstand a missile blast -- something the NRC should consider now, Nevada lawmakers said.

"Everything needs to be re-looked at in the wake of Sept. 11," Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said. "Sept. 11 changed everything."

The NRC has certified 10 different cask designs as safe for shipping high-level radioactive waste, putting each through computer simulations -- not actual tests -- in which casks are theoretically dropped 30 feet onto both an unyielding surface and a spike; crushed by a 5-ton weight; burned at 1,475 degrees for 30 minutes; and immersed in water.

But for now casks are not required to meet missile-blast standards.

"The tests were designed not thinking in particular of sabotage acts," Nancy Osgood, an NRC senior spent fuel project manager, said.

The NRC is quietly planning to re-examine waste container weaknesses, said Wayne Hodges, a NRC deputy director of technical review for spent nuclear fuel.

As part of a "top-to-bottom" review of nuclear material security nationwide, an NRC research team plans a new computer analysis of missile strikes on shipping containers.

The new classified tests would include missile simulations. Test results and factors -- such as the type of cask and missile used -- will not be made public.

Conceivably the new NRC tests could lead to new design requirements for casks, officials said.

But many experts doubt it.

"These things are pretty strong," Hodges said. "But you could always come up with a weapon that can put a hole in it."

Nuclear industry officials argue that their casks are the most robust containers in the world. They say the only way to further protect them from a missile strike would be to wrap them in concrete, making them too heavy to move.

"I'm not sure there is a lot we can do to the cask design and still have an efficient transportation system," said John Vincent, a senior project manager at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nation's top nuclear industry association. "And again, the important question here is: Are we protecting the public as it is? Yes we are."

So is there good reason for the DOE and NRC to oversee new waste container tests and require stronger casks?

Yucca advocates and opponents will agree to disagree.

A more neutral party, Allison Macfarlane, a senior research associate at MIT who has studied Yucca Mountain for years, said not much would be gained by conducting more tests or putting new requirements on casks. The casks can't get much stronger, she said.

But politically, Nevada lawmakers may have ground to gain by arguing that more analysis needs to be done, Macfarlane said.

"This is the one issue that (Nevada officials) can use to convince people in other parts of the country to oppose Yucca Mountain," Macfarlane said. "A missile strike on a waste container is not going to be a high-consequence incident. But it'll scare a lot of people, that's for sure."

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