(The Casper Star-Tribune posted the following Associated Press article by Ken Ritter to its website on July 29.)
LAS VEGAS — Nevada officials maintain that the Energy Department’s plan for shipping the nation’s nuclear waste from 70 sites across the country to the federal government’s proposed dump at Yucca Mountain is too incomplete to assess.
“There is no plan,” Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency Director Bob Loux told a special panel of scientists. “No one can do any planning until they know the mode and the route.”
The 16-member National Academies National Research Council panel was in Nevada last week to consider how the government can safely ship radioactive waste across the country to the proposed dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Energy Department officials said a new administrator should have a transportation plan developed by year’s end. Gary Lanthrum, a former environmental office manager for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in Albuquerque, N.M., takes over Aug. 11, said Robin Sweeney, an official with the Yucca Mountain project.
Ten panel members inspected the site Congress picked last summer to store 77,000 tons of radioactive waste, and all 16 toured road and rail routes skirting the Las Vegas metropolitan area that could be used to ship casks containing spent nuclear fuel. Protesters against the dump appeared several times.
“There are understandable questions here about routes and modes of transportation,” said panel Chairman Neal Lane, a physics professor at Rice University in Houston.
“Our job is to understand and articulate what the risks are of transporting nuclear waste,” he said.
Lane and study director Kevin Crowley said no conclusions have been made. The panel expects to issue a report in early 2005.
Shortly after that, the Energy Department plans to submit its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for opening the Yucca Mountain facility in 2010. Plans call for 24 years of shipments to the ancient volcanic ridge at the western edge of the Nevada Test Site. The waste would be entombed in casks in tunnels 1,000 feet below the surface.
Lane said the panel was looking at risks from normal operations, accidents or sabotage — particularly through hub transportation cities.
“For the rail option,” he said, “much of the material would come through Chicago, St. Louis or Ohio.”
Truck routes would run from South Carolina through Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri on the southeastern interstate system, and a Northeast route would run from New York and Pennsylvania through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Iowa.
The map, drawn from an Energy Department environmental report, shows the routes meeting at Interstate 80 in Omaha, Neb., and crossing Nebraska and Wyoming to Interstate 15 at Salt Lake City before heading into Nevada.
The 16 panelists were drawn from academic, engineering, consulting and policy fields. The National Academies provide technical research and advice on science, engineering and medicine issues.