Letter: Study shows potential for rail disaster

Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005 | 7:55 a.m.

Comparing shipments of highly radioactive waste to shipments of other hazardous materials such as chlorine, Association of American Railroads President Edward Hamberger told the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee last week that "If there were to be a breach, it does not have the same consequence" and "There is no plume, and the immediate impact is not as great."

But if the accident or attack that causes the breach involves a high-temperature, long-duration fire -- all too possible in real-world train wrecks -- there very well could be a plume of radioactive smoke and catastrophic and long-term impacts downwind.

A state of Nevada-commissioned analysis of a 2001 train tunnel fire under downtown Baltimore estimated that, if irradiated nuclear fuel had been aboard, the container would have breached and large amounts of radioactivity would have escaped in the smoke.

Up to 50 people would have been exposed to enough radiation to doom them to eventual death by cancer. The cleanup would have cost $14 billion. If the cleanup was not done, 1,400 people would have eventually died from cancer after living in contaminated areas for just one year. After 50 years of living amid such radiation, over 28,000 people would have died of cancer.

Each of the thousands of rail casks bound for Yucca would hold more than 200 times the radioactive cesium -- which remains hazardous for centuries, is highly volatile in fires and lodges in human muscle such as the heart -- released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

Kevin Kamps Washington, D.C. Editor's note: The writer is a nuclear waste specialist for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a group that opposes the Yucca Mountain project.