Contamination found on shipment of spent nuclear fuel

Suzanne Struglinski

Monday, Aug. 11, 2003 | 9:56 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- A recent Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection detected nearly twice the amount of allowable radiation limits on a spent nuclear fuel rail shipment cask in North Carolina.

The contamination was discovered at the end of July during a routine inspection of a shipment from Progress Energy's Robinson nuclear power plant in South Carolina, after it arrived at the company's Harris plant near Raleigh, N.C. The cask's inspection before leaving Robinson did not detect anything.

Progress spokesman Rick Kimble said nothing leaked from the container. It was not a breach, but instead was a cask that was not properly inspected or decontaminated before leaving South Carolina, he said. He said some material from the fuel pool got onto the cask and a "swab" test done before its departure failed to find it.

"We don't know why it wasn't picked up, but this is unacceptable to us," Kimble said.

He noted that the commission will conduct an investigation and that the amount of contamination involved was "fairly undetectable."

"If you put your hand on the spot for an hour, you would get less than one percent of the radiation of a chest X-ray," Kimble said.

Although the cask was smaller than what would potentially ship nuclear waste to the proposed federal repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the fact that there was contamination -- and the secrecy surrounding it -- concerns Judy Treichel director of the Nevada Nuclear Waste Task Force and other nuclear critics.

"Here you have a cask the exceeds the limit, it is a violation and you can't know anything because it is referred to security," she said.

Treichel noted that the commission's event report even says that certain information cannot be disclosed over "nonsecure communications."

Since few details were made public on the incident, Public Citizen and North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network sent a letter to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper, saying it is "unacceptable for the NRC to withhold information from the public about surface contamination of a container."

"If Progress Energy can't keep the casks clean now in its relatively small-scale shipping campaign, what assurances are there that similar contamination incidents would not be routine if tens of thousands of nuclear shipments start moving to Utah or Nevada?" said Lisa Gue, senior energy analyst with Public Citizen.

A group called Private Fuel Storage hopes to build an interim storage facility on an Indian reservation in Utah.

Kimble said the entire shipping program is safeguarded and those who need to know details do know them.

"This it not a stop the presses type of thing, but the fact is they tell us nothing can go wrong and everything is safe and this (contamination) happens," Treichel said.

She noted that exposure to the legal limit of radiation, 10 milirem at about six feet per hour, "is not a big deal for a male athlete, but for a pregnant female it is a big deal."

She said most people would even be shocked to know there is an allowable limit of radiation.