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A coalition of environmental groups claims a letter from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates that nuclear waste from power plants in Illinois will be trucked to Port Huron and shipped from there to an unknown destination.

“A spill, release or fire here or near waterways that flow into the St. Clair River could potentially ruin one of the largest fresh water deltas in the world – the St. Clair Flats – and potentially poison forever drinking water and freshwater ecosystems for up to 40-plus million people of the Great Lakes, including residents of Canada, the U.S., U.S. Tribes, First Nations and other indigenous peoples,” said Kay Cumbow of the Great Lakes Environmental Alliance in Port Huron, in a news release.

According to the news release from Don’t Waste Michigan, Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes, a letter dated July 13, from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “Secured Transportation Services,” cites an application under 45-day review by the NRC for a highway transport route for high level radioactive waste from the LaSalle nuclear reactors in Illinois to the “Port Huron, Michigan Port of Exit.”

The letter was found July 23 among 467 documents on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s online ADAMS library, according to the news release. The number of transports is not given.

Secured Transportation Services, which is based in Buford, Georgia, is identified on the company’s website as the “leading transportation coordinator for spent nuclear fuel in North America.”

The letter only refers to shipping from central Illinois to Port Huron by a land route, according to the news release. It does not show where or how the waste would move from the city.

In a follow-up interview, Cumbow said the groups have more questions than answers about possible spent fuel shipments coming to Port Huron from Illinois………..

Cumbow said the letter only references highway route approval.

“Once it gets to Port Huron, we don’t know where it goes,” she said.

She said the waste is highly radioactive.

“It’s lethal when you are exposed to it,” Cumbow said. “Shielded, you’re fine. Any accident with this stuff, if there was a serious incident with this stuff, there is a likelihood people will be killed.

“The other thing is we don’t know what’s approved in Canada,” she said. “We don’t know where it is going. It might be going to Canada or it might be going through Canada to somewhere else.”

She said safety issues posed by the state’s crumbling road and bridge infrastructure are other concerns.

 “There might be a little bit of this going across the border, or there might be a whole lot of it going across the border,” Cumbow said. “We just don’t know. I think as a society we should be looking at ways to stop poisoning our land and water.”

According to the news release, NRC spokesman Alex Sapountzis is quoted in an email to an NRC librarian as stating that “details of all spent nuclear fuel routes are designated as Safeguards Information/sensitive information and therefore will not be placed in ADAMS. All a member of the public will see in ADAMS is that in a letter we state we accepted for review a route (it has all the information we need to conduct our review) and then an approval letter (based on the information the applicant submitted, we accept the route and for transport by road it’s good for 5 years or by rail for 7 years).”

Contact Bob Gross at (810) 989-6263 or rgross@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @RobertGross477.  https://www.thetimesherald.com/story/news/local/port-huron/2018/08/03/group-nuclear-waste-could-trucked-illinois-port-huron/899259002/