DOE designates rail route for Yucca

Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2003 | 11:09 a.m.

CARSON CITY -- The Energy Department on Tuesday announced it plans to transport spent nuclear fuel by rail through rural Nevada to Yucca Mountain, if a repository opens there as proposed.

The DOE, which plans to open the high-level waste dump by 2010, chose as its first preference a yet-to-be-constructed rail line that would begin outside Caliente, 150 miles northeast of Las Vegas, and wind north of the Nevada Test Site and west of the Nellis Air Force Range to its destination. The route is 319 miles long.

The agency's second choice would bring waste along Interstate 80 in Northern Nevada through Carlin, 50 miles east of Battle Mountain, and south to Yucca Mountain along a rail line that would need to be built.

Although the routes avoid Clark County, local officials did not welcome the news.

"It's bad. We don't want it in this state," Clark County Commissioner Myrna Williams said Tuesday.

The news came in a letter to Gov. Kenny Guinn from Margaret Chu, director of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

In the letter, Chu said the DOE rejected two potential corridors that would go through the Las Vegas Valley in favor of a "more remote location and the reduced likelihood of land-use conflicts."

Reaction by state officials was swift and unfavorable. The Energy Department is jumping the gun, they said, because the state is carrying its case to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals next month in Washington and, if it loses, to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the nuclear dump from being built.

"Any designation is premature," Guinn said, adding that the state was not consulted on the selection of the potential route.

Bob Loux, director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Office, said the legal fight is still on and if the state wins, the decisions on the transportation routes would be illegal.

He added that the DOE chose the "most challenging route" to build. The route would go through the Chief, North Pahroc, Golden Gate and Kawich mountain ranges.

The cost of construction would be $880 million as estimated in 2001 dollars and take 46 months to build, according to the final environmental study done on the proposed route. An estimated 842 workers would be hired. Six construction camps would be built for temporary quarters for the workers.

Only 4.6 percent of the land along the route is in private ownership. The Bureau of Land Management owns 92 percent, the Air Force 5.3 percent and the Energy Department, 2.3 percent, the environmental study said.

Fred Dilger, a Clark County planner who works on Yucca Mountain issues, said that because of the construction difficulties, the waste likely would end up coming through Clark County.

"Because it is going to take so much time and money to build, the Department of Energy will begin the process of construction, but they will build and finance truck transportation. At some point the railroad route will fail, and the DOE will say, 'Well, we have this existing truck transportation.' "

An over-the-road option could bring trucks loaded with high-level radioactive waste through Las Vegas. The default transportation route for the department, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, is the U.S. highway system.

If the DOE makes its final decision on using trains and the Caliente route, there would only be a minimal amount of trucks hauling nuclear waste in Nevada, Allen Benson, Energy Department spokesman, said.

He said the governor would then designate a preferred route for the trucks to follow.

Benson said the out-of-state shippers would determine which route they would send the waste by rail across the United States.

The final environmental study measured "incident-free radiological impacts" along both the rail transportation route and for truck shipments. It estimates less than one death of a worker from latent cancer over the 24 years of operation. And there would be less than one death in the general public from cancer caused radiation during this period, the DOE study estimated.

The DOE, in a press release, said it and industry have safely completed about 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste without the harmful release of radiation. Worldwide there have been more than 70,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel shipped safely in the past 25 years, the agency said.

The new route had Nevada's congressional delegation questioning the timing.

"The fact that the DOE has said to Nevada, in Nevada, that they would postpone the decision (to pick a transportation route) until 2006 -- it's disingenuous," Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., said. "We are on the eve of our legal hearing. My question to them is why now?"

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the department doesn't even have the final say about what the route to Yucca will be.

"The Department of Energy does not have a license to open a nuclear waste dump in our state, and releasing a preferred route puts them nowhere closer to having that ability," Reid said in a statement.

Even though the rail line would reduce the number of shipments to Yucca Mountain by five times, according to DOE officials, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. said the risk is still there.

"This is pure unadulterated nonsense on the part of the Department of Energy," Berkley said. "There is no safe way to transport 70,000 tons of nuclear waste. I don't care if they ship it by truck. I don't care if they fly it. I don't care if they put it on a railroad. It won't work."

Berkley also noted that the announcement came days after the nation was put on orange alert, an observation shared by Mayor Oscar Goodman.

The mayor, through a spokeswoman, said, "At this time, while our nation is at orange alert, to be told that radioactive waste is safe is ludicrous. The people of Nevada were fooled once with Washington's propaganda about the atom bomb testing. Shame on us if they fool us twice."

Williams noted the eve-of-Christmas Eve timing of the decision.

"That's quite a gift," she said. "The timing I think is very political. On Jan. 14 the federal courts are going to hear this.

The DOE said now it will have to develop an environmental impact statement on the specific railway alignment within the corridor. It said that will take several years before construction can begin.

"No waste will be transported to the repository until 2010, when the department anticipates that it will have received a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to open the repository," the DOE said. A citizen watchdog group wondered about the choice of the rural route.

"We question why Caliente was chosen over others." Citizen Alert Executive Director Peggy Maze Johnson said. "Is it to give the people in Clark County the impression that we have nothing to fear because the southern routes were not named?"

The mayors from North Las Vegas and Boulder City said that if the nuclear waste must come into Nevada it is better that the waste be transported through the less populated areas north of Clark County.

"If there has to be a preferred route I would go with that one," Boulder City Mayor Bob Ferraro said about the more northern route. "It gets it away from the more populated areas."

North Las Vegas mayor Michael Montandon said that while "none of us are thrilled by the transportation of nuclear waste," the route that would bring it through less populated areas is preferred.

Montandon and Ferraro also said they think that Caliente officials want the waste to travel through their city, with the hopes that it would bring economic development to the area.

"So why not go where they want you?" Montandon asked.

Henderson Mayor Jim Gibson said that while traveling through less populated areas is obviously better than bringing the waste through heavily populated areas, "this whole issue of transportation is not just a Nevada issue."

Gibson said he's spoken with mayors from around the country and they are all worried about what path the waste would travel. Gibson said he would have to see the entire proposed route to judge whether one of better than another.

However, Gibson added that bringing the waste by rail through Caliente "is at least better than bringing it across the dam in trucks."

Sun reporters

Jennifer Knight, Launce Rake, Dan Kulin and Sito Negron contributed to this story.

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