Nuke waste transportation problems cited

Benjamin Grove

Wednesday, April 23, 2003 | 9:39 a.m.

ROCKVILLE, Md. -- Fourteen months after the Energy Department deemed Yucca Mountain a safe place to bury the nation's nuclear waste, the department still has no plan to safely haul the highly radioactive material there, paid consultants for the state of Nevada said Tuesday.

Among their unanswered questions: Will the department adopt a mostly rail or mostly truck strategy? How many shipments will there be each year? Which agency is in charge of an accident? And what kind of testing will shipping containers undergo?

Energy Department assurances about waste transportation safety should be taken with a grain of salt, consultant Bob Halstead told a Nuclear Regulatory Commission panel.

"Most, if not all, of the important decisions are yet to be made," Halstead said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be responsible for licensing and regulating the first-of-its-kind high-level waste repository at Yucca. The Energy Department intends to submit a license application to the commission in December 2004, and the commission could take up to four years to approve it.

The repository is slated for completion in 2010, although critics doubt the Energy Department can meet that schedule.

On Tuesday the NRC's Advisory Committee on Nuclear Waste spent the afternoon listening to presentations from four Nevada consultants, who outlined flaws in the 38-year plan to ship 77,000 tons of waste to Yucca from Defense sites and nuclear power plants nationwide.

In previous meetings nuclear industry and federal government officials have told the panel that the massive shipping campaign can be completed safely.

At the heart of the safety question are the number of shipments and the methods used to haul waste to Nevada, Halstead said. If mostly trucks and some rail shipments are used, it could take as many as 108,000 shipments. Energy Department officials have said they prefer a mostly rail plan, which would greatly reduce the number of shipments.

But there are problems with implementing a mostly rail scenario. Among them: constructing a Nevada rail spur to Yucca Mountain that would be the biggest and most expensive -- between $1 billion and $2 billion -- rail project in decades, Halstead said.

Nevada is suing the Energy Department for not including a detailed transportation plan in its final environmental impact statement.

"Instead the transportation analysis contained in the FEIS is legally and substantially deficient and entirely inadequate," Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said.

Nevada wants a comprehensive risk assessment of shipping the nation's waste to Yucca, Loux said. Nevada also wants an accident prevention and emergency response program, and new tests of full-scale models of the giant metal waste containers that would be loaded onto trains and trucks for shipping.

Those tests are now being developed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and are tentatively set for next year. The Nevada consultants laid out a list of their concerns about the tests, too. Nevada officials are worried the tests will focus too much on crash "impact" tests and not enough on fire tests.

At the very least the NRC should test at least one full-scale -- not a model -- of one rail cask and one truck cask that would actually be used to haul waste to Nevada, Halstead said.

Nevada consultant Marvin Resnikoff completed an analysis of the Baltimore tunnel fire in July 2001, which burned for five days. Current NRC regulations require nuclear waste containers to withstand a 1,475-degree fire for 30 minutes, but the Baltimore fire burned hotter and longer than that, Resnikoff said. The fire should prod the NRC to more thoroughly test casks and reconsider cask requirements, he said.

Questions about the shipping containers are a top concern on a long list of concerns about the Energy Department's lack of a transportation plan, said Jim Hall, a consultant who is a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

"These casks are not designed to withstand all credible accidents that could happen," Hall said.

In other action Tuesday, Kevin Crowley, director of the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Radioactive Waste Management, said there is still time to study and develop a safe waste transportation plan. To that end, the academy board plans to launch a two-year, $842,000 study of waste shipping to Yucca, Crowley said.

The study will consider accident and terrorism risks, along with technical and societal concerns. The report will be complete in early 2005, Crowley said. A narrower, six-month National Academy study requested by Congress that will examine the procedures used to select waste-shipping routes, will be conducted in conjunction with the broader study, Crowley said.

The National Academy panel that will conduct the broader study will meet first in Washington next month, then hold its second meeting in Las Vegas. The date and venue for the Las Vegas meeting are not set.

Hauling waste to Nevada could cost roughly $8.4 billion, according to Energy Department estimates, or $9.2 billion according to Nevada estimates. A nuclear waste accident could cost an estimated $10 billion, Nevada consultants said.