Article: A Nuke Train Gets Ready To Roll

["Jacobus, John (OD/ORS)" <jacobusj@ors.od.nih.gov>]

This article appeared in the print edition and on-line NEWSWEEK Web site.

The Web site also has a poll, "How do you feel about having spent nuclear

fuel transported by train," you can take at

http://www.msnbc.com/news/603339.asp.  The results, so far, are for 3992

responses:

 

I think it's OK. They seem to be taking the proper precautions and the

containers seem safe  64% 

I don't like it. Transporting nuclear waste by train opens up risk of leaks

and sabotage  30% 

I'm undecided  7% 

Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents'

views and are not scientifically valid surveys. 



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist 

3050 Traymore Lane

Bowie, MD  20715-2024

E-mail:  jenday1@email.msn.com (H)      

---------------

A Nuke Train Gets Ready To Roll 

 

The administration wants more nuclear plants, so it's eager to show that

it's perfectly safe to ship the used fuel. But nobody wants radioactive

cargo chugging by their town  

 

By Adam Piore

NEWSWEEK 



      July 30 issue -  The "No Nukes" buttons dated from the 1970s and the

audience consisted of curious locals, including a 9-year-old boy and his

puppy. But when Kevin Kamps brought the anti-nuke campaign to tiny Moberly,

Mo., last week, he loudly sounded the alarm. Kamps, an organizer for the

Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a Washington-based anti-nuke

group, is on the road to whip up opposition to a controversial federal plan

to transport a trainload of spent nuclear fuel from New York state to Idaho.





     "WE'RE HERE to warn people that a shipment of highly radioactive waste

will be moving through Moberly by train," Kamps told his listeners. "This

could be the first of tens of thousands of shipments." The rally was small,

but effective. Two TV crews and some reporters showed up and concern was

duly spread. "If this spills in town, will they come clean it up?" asked one

worried mother.   



         With the Bush administration committed to reviving the nation's

nuclear industry, people in Moberly and all across the country will be

getting a crash course in nuclear safety-a hot-button issue from the '70s

whose time is coming again. There's plenty to be said in favor of nuclear

energy: it's often cheaper than oil, cleaner than coal and it's arguably

safer than it used to be. "If you want to do something about carbon dioxide

emissions," Vice President Dick Cheney said in March, "then you ought to

build nuclear power plants." Linking nukes to global warming was a shrewd

bit of spin calculated to split the opposition, and it may work. Most

nationals polls show a slow rise in public support for nuclear power as

concern for global warming has grown.



        But if the Bush administration intends to push ahead with nukes it

must solve an intractable problem-finding a safe way to store thousands of

tons of highly radioactive spent fuel from the nation's power reactors.

There are 40,000 metric tons of depleted uranium fuel immersed in storage

pools or encased in aboveground casks in 34 states, and the industry is

adding substantially to that total every year. (There are 103 nuclear plants

in operation, and they provide 20 percent of the nation's electricity.)

Since the mid-'80s the Feds have been preparing to stash all that waste in a

tunnel under Yucca Mountain, Nev. The Yucca Mountain plan has been tied up

with lawsuits and environmental-impact studies for years, and critics say

important environmental questions still haven't been answered. But the

Energy Department, which is responsible for finding a solution to the

nation's nuclear-waste problem, says Secretary Spencer Abraham will make a

final decision on the facility by the end of this year. Abraham is expected

to say yes.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Train: Union Pacific diesel-electric locomotive pulling six cars: two will

hold nuclear waste in containers called casks, three are buffer cars and one

is a passenger car that will carry a DOE emergency team and an armed

security guard. 

Cask construction: Each dumbbell-shaped cask is 20 feet long and seven feet

in diameter. The casks are made of nine-inch-thick steel and weigh 75 tons

each when empty.

Safety measures: Tests for preventing leakage and nuclear chain reactions

include dropping the cask 30 feet onto an unyielding surface, engulfing it

with fire for 30 minutes and immersing it into three feet of water. 

Cargo: Forty-seven tons of nuclear waste to be stored in the Idaho National

Engineering and Environmental Laboratory 

Route: Stops or passes through Machias, N.Y.; Driftwood, Pa., and New

Castle, Pa., then crosses Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and

southern Wyoming into southeastern Idaho.

The estimated time for the trip: four days.  



----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----



     If Congress approves, the moribund nuclear energy industry will be

instantly revitalized. Because Yucca Mountain isn't scheduled to open until

2010, the industry is trying to set up an interim storage site on a Goshute

Indian reservation 45 miles south of Salt Lake City, Utah. That means the

trains and trucks could start rolling as early as 2003. The antinuclear

movement's strategy is obvious: stoke opposition by playing on the fear of

radioactive contamination that could result from a truck or train accident.

Activists say nuke shipments are "mobile Chernobyls"-hyperbole, but still a

good slogan.   

  

         Ground zero for the looming confrontation is a dilapidated nuclear

storage facility in West Valley, N.Y., 35 miles south of Buffalo. With

mounting concern over safety issues and protests, the shipment is being

planned like a military operation. The train will consist of seven cars, two

of which will be flatcars laden with white, dumbbell-shaped containers that

are fire-and crash-resistant. Known as casks, these containers will house

the radioactive cargo-125 bundles of metal rods filled with uranium pellets.

A DOE emergency team will ride in a passenger car at the rear, accompanied

by an armed security guard. In Pennsylvania, state police will shadow the

train. In New York, local police will check highway crossings and monitor

the track ahead. DOE officials will follow the train's progress by

satellite. John Chamberlain, a spokesman for the West Valley facility, said

law-enforcement officials will be tracking the train with security and

emergency personnel "at the ready." From New York, the train will run

through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska

and Wyoming en route to a vast DOE reservation in southeastern Idaho. 



        Hoping to keep protest groups at least somewhat off balance, DOE

officials are keeping the train's departure date secret. They have been

planning the shipment for more than a year and Chamberlain confirmed to

NEWSWEEK that the FBI has been asked to "screen" for protests by antinuclear

groups. If a protest does occur, Chamberlain said, "the main thing is to

ensure the safety of the shipment. If you find out there will be a protest

500 miles ahead, you park the train. If something happens right in front of

you, obviously you'd have to stop."   

 

       Activists all along the route are mobilizing to meet the train, and

the potential for disruption is real. In July, Kamps and others ran a

civil-disobedience seminar in Fort Wayne, Ind., that included training in

how to form a human chain. Participants watched a slide show of an anti-nuke

protest in Germany that led to successful attempts to block a train. Some

German protesters carried off sections of rail and undermined the tracks by

tunneling. Others chained themselves to the tracks, and some glued

themselves to the tracks. "In Germany a group of six people held up a train

for 18 hours," Kamps said.



        The train's starting point, known as the Western New York Nuclear

Service Center, is a dilapidated monument to the failure of U.S. nuclear

policy and an environmental mess. Built to reprocess spent fuel from

commercial power reactors, the plant shut down in 1972 and never reopened.

Nowadays, hazardous waste is stored in a huge warehouse and under tarpaulins

in the surrounding fields. Until May the 125 reactor fuel assemblies were

stored in a slowly deteriorating indoor pool lined with brown scum and

filled with lethally radioactive water.   

 

       "West Valley is a testament to what happens when you don't plan from

the outset," says Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer at MIT. "People really

didn't think about nuclear waste." They are now-and when the train finally

pulls out of West Valley, the future direction of America's energy policy

will be onboard.

       

       © 2001 Newsweek, Inc.

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