Budget cuts could delay Yucca shipping plans

Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2003 | 9 a.m.

Budget cuts for planning nuclear waste transportation to Yucca Mountain could delay the Energy Department's ability to unveil details of shipping methods and routes beyond this year, officials said Tuesday.

The Energy Department had expected to receive $38 million from Congress for planning transportation this year, said Jeff Williams, acting director of DOE's national transportation office. A strategic transportation plan was expected by the end of this year.

But when President Bush signed the department's budget last week, less than $10 million was allocated for transportation plans, he said.

"We are not very far along with transportation plans," he told the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

The Energy Department is planning to open the nation's first high-level nuclear waste repository by 2010 at Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

While department officials would prefer moving 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste by train, Williams said it will likely take a combination of trucks and trains to bring the spent nuclear waste to Yucca.

There currently are no railroad tracks to Yucca Mountain.

In an effort to keep nuclear waste shipments out of the Las Vegas Valley, the department is looking at several rail routes through rural Nevada, but warn that they are expensive.

The most costly and the longest route would run 320 miles from Caliente in Lincoln County, about 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas. It would cost an estimated $880 million to build the tracks, Williams said. Most of the route runs on Bureau of Land Management land, he said.

The least expensive route would cost $263 million and it is the shortest at 98 miles, Williams said. That route parallels tracks through North Las Vegas and is known as the Apex alternative.

Higher security demands from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would license a repository, would add to the shipping costs.

Williams said the nuclear waste shipments could require armed guards, real-time satellite tracking and dedicated trains -- meaning no other freight could travel with the nuclear materials.

Once the nuclear cargo arrives at a repository, it would be cut out of its transportation container and prepared to go directly underground or processed for future burial.

If a container arrives and somehow radiation has contaminated it, workers at Yucca would have to handle the problem quickly, said James Gardiner of the office of repository development.

"When we cut the canister open, we'll find out about it and we'll have to react fairly quickly," Gardiner said. A larger package would probably envelope the radioactive container and a robotic system could take it out to a dry storage area northeast of the repository to cool down, he said.

In the first year of the repository's operation, the department expects to receive up to 400 nuclear waste containers and process about two a day, Gardiner said. The annual shipments would gradually increase until 3,000 containers a year would arrive beginning in 2014 and continue until Yucca is filled.