Nuclear dump concern grows

But nowhere is the awareness more prevalent, they said, than in the Las Vegas Valley, where rail cars and trucks carrying casks of spent nuclear fuel rods will travel if the Department of Energy decides to build a 319-mile rail line from Caliente to the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"When you talk to the mayors who have routes through their cities, and tell them that this is not a local problem but a national problem, they become emphatic," Goodman told members of the state Commission on Nuclear Projects.

After the meeting, Bob Loux, executive director of the Nevada Nuclear Projects Agency, said opinion polls and campaigns by watchdog groups have heightened awareness about the government’s plans to begin waste shipments to the mountain in a decade or more.

"I think awareness and concern about it is growing," Loux said.

The commission’s meeting came a day after the Nevada Conservation League, the Sierra Club and Citizen Alert joined colleagues in the Southeastern United States in opposing plans to transport spent fuel from nuclear power plants for reprocessing at the Savannah River site in South Carolina.

"It’s really the first time that any other part of the country has started saying, ‘You can’t put this stuff on our roads,’ " said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a statewide environmental group.

The Commission on Nuclear Projects meeting also followed a workshop Tuesday in which Nevada’s transportation consultant, Bob Halstead, gave a presentation on the state’s expectations to the nonprofit U.S. Transport Council, a nuclear industry backed group that’s independent of the government.

Some participants on the council’s panel represent companies that expect to shoulder the task of transporting nuclear waste.

Halstead gave a similar presentation Wednesday to the Commission on Nuclear Projects, emphasizing that if the Caliente rail route is selected it will pose unacceptable risks to Las Vegas.

"This will be the most challenging rail project in this country in many decades," Halstead said.

He noted that at a minimum 5 percent of the total rail casks, and more than likely 50 percent of them, would roll through the Las Vegas Valley, posing safety risks from human error to providing targets for terrorists.

Under a maximum scenario, depending on a railroad’s selection of routes, up to 87 percent of all rail shipments could pass through the Las Vegas Valley, representing almost all shipments across the United States with the exception of those from the Pacific Northwest.

"When we get to Las Vegas, what are they dealing with? We’re dealing with a city built around a railroad," Halstead said.

He said most of the used nuclear fuel assemblies inside the shipping casks would come from reactor sites in the East and Midwest. They would pass through two "gateways," or marshaling sites, in Kansas City and Memphis, where railcars of highly radioactive waste could sit for up to 48 hours.

When Department of Energy officials describe their nuclear waste shipping strategy as "mostly rail, they also mean a lot of trucks," Halstead said.

Legal weight truck shipments would increase from 25 in the first year of the transportation campaign to 175 in the fifth year.

Allen Benson, Energy Department spokesman for the Office of Repository Development in Las Vegas, said the public will have a chance to comment at hearings this fall on the rail corridor draft impact statement and a supplement for the Yucca Mountain site.

"We are not selecting any national routing at this point," Benson said before Tuesday’s U.S. Transport Council meeting.

National routes will be handled through a step-by-step process, he said.