Editorial: Why invite inevitable disaster?

Wednesday, April 7, 2004 | 9:03 a.m.

In a few years trains loaded with nuclear waste will be creeping past homes all over the country. That is, if the Energy Department prevails in its plan to permanently bury the waste in Nevada. Under this plan, trains will set forth from every region, with their destination being Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

For years the Energy Department was coy on the transportation issue, not wanting to fully commit itself to trains, which are somewhat safer but a lot more expensive than trucks. On Monday, however, the department formally announced that if Yucca Mountain is approved, trains will play the greater role in moving the waste from 127 storage sites around the country. This may have been meant to assuage safety concerns. But the sheer numbers that the Energy Department cited should be enough to awaken this country to the danger -- there will be 3,300 rail shipments over a 24-year-period.

Even assuming these numbers have not been understated (and assuming that the Energy Department is even being truthful, given the cost of rail transport), that is a lot of years and a lot of shipments. Accidents would be inevitable. The vulnerability of trains to routine accidents (let alone terrorism) was made crystal clear at last month's meeting of the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington. The board announced its determination that a catastrophic derailment in North Dakota in January 2002 was caused by fractured connector bars, which hold sections of track together. Five tank cars carrying anhydrous ammonia, a poisonous gas, ruptured and the whole area of about 11,600 residents was threatened by vapors. One resident was killed and 300 were injured.

The Energy Department also announced Monday that not all of the waste storage sites in the country are accessible by rail, so there will need to be 1,079 shipments by truck. A few hours after the department's announcement a truck in Kentucky loaded with sodium hydrosulfite, a poisonous industrial chemical, "collided with a car and burned through the night," according to an Associated Press report. A sparsely populated area within a one-mile radius of the truck was evacuated.

These kinds of accidents are fairly regular occurrences on our nation's highways and railroads. Nuclear shipments, no matter how much thought is put into them, cannot be made immune to human error and the failings of infrastructure. This being known, the country should insist that the waste remain where it is until a safer, saner storage plan can be adopted. We hope the nation's residents begin voicing their concerns now, rather than waiting until the day they see train cars emblazoned with the radiation warning symbol gliding past their windows. By then it will be too late to prevent the inevitable.