Empty nuke can on train tips; no radiation released

Friday, Sept. 23, 2005 | 10:27 a.m.

SUN STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS

WASHINGTON -- An empty container used to store spent nuclear fuel tipped over Thursday while being hauled by train to a shipyard. The container was not damaged and there was no release of radiation, according to the Energy Department.

The 320,000-pound container tipped when the train sideswiped another in the CSX Frontier Railyard in Buffalo, N.Y., CSX spokesman Gary Sease said. No one was hurt.

The container was being taken to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, from the Energy Department's Naval Reactors Facility at the Idaho National Laboratory, where it had been emptied of used nuclear fuel from a Navy warship.

Nuclear industry and Yucca Mountain foes pointed to the accident as an example of what could be expected if high-level nuclear waste stored at sites nationwide is shipped to the proposed nuclear waste repository, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The proposal calls for years of waste shipments by train and truck from the nuclear power plants, and from U.S. defense sites where nuclear waste from Navy vessels is stored.

Accidents will be inevitable and first-responders will not be prepared to deal with high-level waste accidents, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said. Congress has not yet addressed the threat of a terrorist attack on a waste shipment, Berkley said.

"There is no guarantee that this can be done safely, and that is all the more reason to keep deadly nuclear waste where it was produced, rather than putting our communities and our families in harm's way," Berkley said.

High-level waste shipments in the United States are now fairly rare, mostly of military waste, and can involve months of planning. If Yucca opened, the Energy Department would launch a shipping campaign unprecedented in its size and frequency.

"They would be rushed every day, and that just increases the risks," said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist with the anti-Yucca Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

According to the Energy Department, there have been more than 2,700 shipments of high-level waste in this country in the last 30 years, and 738 Navy waste shipments since 1957 that traveled more than 1 million miles -- all without a release of radiation.

The total number of U.S. high-level waste shipping accidents was not readily available, Energy Department and Navy spokesmen said. Jim Carey, a spokesman for the Energy Department's Pittsburgh Naval Reactors Office, said he was aware of only one other minor incident at the Idaho laboratory site, but details were not immediately available.

The massive steel containers used for shipping waste have been dropped, beaten, submerged in water and set on fire in tests and remained "intact," Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens said.

"Using that data, we can ensure the safest possible transportation of these containers," he said.

Critics are skeptical that there have been no radiation leaks in accidents.

Sun Washington Bureau Chief Benjamin Grove and the Associated Press contributed to this story.