(The following story by Carl Prine appeared on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review website on July 26. Scott Palmer is Chairman of the BLET’s Oregon State Legislative Board.)
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — A Department of Energy study details how the federal government might ship 7,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste through Pittsburgh to Nevada’s proposed Yucca Mountain repository.
Buried deep inside the recently released study, maps show that Pittsburgh for 24 years beginning in 2018 would be the rail corridor through which 1,107 massive casks containing spent nuclear fuel from nine commercial reactors would pass.
The department proposes using 372 trains to transport atomic waste from reactors at Three Mile Island, Susquehanna and Limerick facilities in Pennsylvania; Salem and Hope Creek in New Jersey; North Anna in Virginia; and Calvert Cliffs in Maryland.
That breaks down to about 15 or 16 “glow trains” moving through Pittsburgh every year through 2042. If Congress approves it, the number of shipments could double through 2067.
Why some are concerned: In an age of terrorism and following non-nuclear accidents in recent years that unleashed deadly gas along the rails in Graniteville, S.C. and Bexar County, Texas, critics fear that cities like Pittsburgh — dubbed “high threat urban areas” by the Department of Homeland Security — could become cancer zones killing tens of thousands of people in the wake of a derailment or sabotage.
“The bottom line is that it can be done safely, but that doesn’t mean it will be done safely, whether we’re talking about accidents or terrorism,” said Robert Halstead, transportation director of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects.
Others, however, believe such fears are overblown and only impede a program designed to sweep nearly a half-century’s accumulation of atomic debris out of 72 commercial reactors and five government labs nationwide.
“The facts speak for themselves. A staggering amount of spent fuel has been shipped, not only in this country but around the world, for 40 years. No one has ever been killed by anything released from these nuclear packages,” said Robert H. Jones, a California engineering consultant to federal nuclear agencies and one of the designers of atomic shipping containers designed to withstand major accidents.
Jones believes the chance of anyone in Pittsburgh ever being harmed by a nuclear fuel shipment is equal to “being hit by a meteor, in the range of possibilities.”
Tasks for casks
Tilting the scales at about 125 tons each, nuclear casks look like enormous spools turned on their sides. To prevent radioactive rays from escaping and killing everyone around them in less than two minutes, they’re lined with steel, concrete, lead and exotic materials. The federal government wants to transport up to five casks at a time on a “dedicated train” hauled by two locomotives and protected by armed guards.
If the plan is approved, up to 12 percent of all nuclear casks destined for shipment nationwide would travel through Allegheny County. One out of every four of the nation’s nuclear casks would go through Pennsylvania, and 43 of the state’s 67 counties would witness the freight pass-through.
According to the report, Erie would receive 827 casks of nuclear waste in 272 shipments from 12 sites as far east as the Maine Yankee commercial reactor. Interstate 90 would carry 313 trucks bound from New York’s Ginna reactor. Another 344 trucks laden with nuclear canisters would drive Interstate 80 from the Pilgrim, Mass., reactor through Clarion County.
The report’s proposed paths through Pennsylvania largely were determined by the quality of railroad tracks and the fact that traffic signals and switching levers can be controlled mainly from secure headquarters. Those features won’t force conductors to make long stops or rumble down poorly maintained lines. According to the study’s maps, the bulk of Pennsylvania’s nuclear freight would be toted by rail giants CSX and Norfolk-Southern.
“Unfortunately, as common carriers, we have the obligation to haul the stuff. We’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said spokesman Tom White of the Association of American Railroads.
The trade group represents CSX, Norfolk Southern and other large rail corporations that control about 97 percent of track freight nationwide. These carriers advised the feds to ship nuclear cargo on dedicated trains using the latest safety technology and the highest security, and they’re pleased to see their recommendations finally accepted. Federal law protects railroads from any legal liability from radioactive spills during transport.
“The routes choose themselves,” said Scott Palmer, an Oregon Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers & Trainmen representative on the federal task force addressing Yucca Mountain transportation issues. He’s planning a conference for the nation’s major rail labor leaders so that they can begin to coordinate education and certification of workers, with the goal of ensuring that only the best trained and most experienced personnel handle atomic cargo.
In a written response to questions posed by the Tribune-Review, Department of Energy spokesman Allen Benson insisted final routes won’t be selected until a “collaborative process” unfolds that includes the major railroads, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Pennsylvania officials said they have monitored proposed nuclear shipment plans for years.
“It’s been moving slowly, but it’s coming along. Do we still have some issues? Yes,” said Rich Janati, nuclear safety chief for the Department of Environmental Protection. “Our major issue is the fact that Pennsylvania is going to experience so many shipments, and we’ve also been looking at how we select the right routes, the training of emergency responders, funding for local communities for their emergency responders.
“I’d say those are our issues, but there is time to work that out.”
Killer cancers?
The shipments in 2018 won’t be the first time Pittsburgh has hosted nuclear material. Waste from the 1979 meltdown at Three Mile Island’s Reactor 2 traveled sporadically until 1990 through Allegheny County to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy and the Federal Railroad Administration told the Trib that the public outcry over those shipments helped sculpt the long-term plans they’re developing today.
Local officials said Pittsburgh is better prepared than most cities to contain a potential calamity. Emergency crews get specialized training and equipment to mitigate fallout from a meltdown at Beaver Valley’s reactor in Shippingport. Federal money was used to teach local responders how to deal with a terrorist “dirty bomb” triggered by terrorists.
“We know the Yucca Mountain shipments will probably be coming through here. We knew from our experiences at TMI and because of the way the railroads go that it would all probably be coming Downtown,” said Raymond DeMichiei, Pittsburgh’s deputy director of emergency management. “But that makes sense. They want the shipments to go on the best maintained tracks. The best maintained tracks are those that carry passengers. Passengers get on and off in big cities.”
City Council President Doug Shields said there’s enough time for the mayor or council to investigate whether they can prod the federal agencies and railroads to reroute atomic shipments around Allegheny County, avoiding highly populated neighborhoods entirely. The concept is modeled on an attempt by Washington officials to force railroads to move toxic gas cargo away from potential terrorist targets in the nation’s capital.
“It was a matter of concern before, during the Three Mile Island shipments, and it still is. Washington, D.C., tried to enact an ordinance to restrict hazardous cargo moving through areas terrorists would want to target. If we can’t do that at the local level, where is the federal and state government on this issue?” said Shields.
Federal officials say there might be no need to reroute because the nuclear casks are “robust,” and the procedures designed to pack and ship them are safe and secure.
The process: Spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste will be loaded while underwater into the large rail or truck containers. Workers will drain liquid from the casks and refill them with pressurized gases, such as helium. Then they’ll weld or rivet shut the vessels and load them onto the trains or onto trucks with beds up to 60 feet long and capable of hauling more than 115,000 pounds of nuclear cargo.
Federal agencies believe these containers can withstand nearly any punishment, including a fiery jetliner crash. They predict less than a 1 in 333 million chance annually of any “incident” spewing the radioactive guts of a container, and if the innards do spill out no more than nine deaths from latent cancer exposure would follow, according to the federal study.
“Even severe rail and truck accidents are highly unlikely to breach the casks. In the rare instance in which an accident would be so severe that its contents would be released, the latent cancer fatality rate would be indistinguishable from the normal cancer incidence rate in the general population,” said the Department of Energy’s Benson.
In a report prepared by Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects, however, physicists said up to 40,868 people could die of cancers caused by a ruptured container, perhaps by terrorists smart enough to use different types of bombs to free the radioactivity.
“They’ve ignored the science they didn’t like. And they assumed that the bad guys would use only one explosive. If you assume they use two explosives, their estimates go out the window. All the military experts we’ve talked to said it would be much, much worse, but their nuclear engineers have disagreed with them,” said Halstead of the Nevada agency.
His gravest fear: What the federal study termed “a long-duration, high-temperature fire that would engulf a cask,” like the 2001 Baltimore Rail Tunnel fire. He and other critics worry that flames would melt the lead shields separating deadly gamma rays from human flesh, and smoke would churn the skies with atomic particles, the wind spreading cancer and causing up to $10 billion in cleanup costs, or the abandonment of whole neighborhoods.
Both the federal Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which designed and tested the casks, say the containers would survive, intact, and that any cleanup costs likely would involve only the damage to trains or trucks.