nuclear-news

Safer nuke shipments? Critics split on whether tech has cut nuclear transportation risk, reno gazette journal, Scott Sonner, Associated Press  Oct. 14, 2019  “…… Today, radioactive shipments are hauled in double-walled steel containers inside specialized trailers that undergo extensive testing and are tracked by GPS and real-time apps.But whether shipping technology has evolved enough to be deemed safe depends on whom you ask.

The Trump administration’s revival of a decades-old plan to move the nation’s most dangerous radioactive waste to a remote spot in the Nevada desert has reignited a long-running fight in the courts and Congress over how to safely get the hazardous remnants of decades of bomb-making and power generation to a permanent resting place.

“It seems to me, that part of the gist of the government’s argument is that, ‘We’ve been doing this a long time. We know what we are doing. You have to trust us,’” noted U.S. District Judge Miranda Du who’s considering a lawsuit Nevada filed against the Energy Department over waste being sent there.

For its part, the government says there are no safety concerns……….

But there have been close calls, said Robert Halstead, an analyst who has studied the dangers of transporting radioactive waste for 35 years and is head of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects.

A truck crash in 1971 killed a driver and propelled a cask full of nuclear waste into a ditch in Tennessee. The container was damaged, but no radioactive material leaked.

More recently a Tennessee contractor revealed earlier this year it may have mislabeled low-level nuclear waste – items such as contaminated equipment or workers’ clothing – that potentially was sent to Nevada over six years without the proper safeguards.

The Energy Department responded by announcing in July it will review all radioactive waste packaging and shipping.

Perhaps the greatest point of disagreement is whether the “rigorous testing” is rigorous enough. It would be dangerous and expensive to run tests involving explosions, fire or other hazards on a real cask of spent nuclear fuel. So it’s never been done in the United States.

“What isn’t clear is: ‘What are the conditions under which the package would fail?” said Edwin Lyman, head of the nuclear safety project at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has studied the hazards of nuclear shipments for 25 years.

There’s enough high-level nuclear waste awaiting disposal in the U.S. to fill a football field 65 feet deep. Few states want to house it within their borders.

To solve the long-time problem, the Trump Administration has revived a decades-old plan to move the nation’s most dangerous radioactive waste from around the country to a site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. It was proposed to hold 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel in a maze of tunnels bored into an ancient volcanic ridge.

Nevada doesn’t want it. The state and its congressional delegation have been fighting the project and other attempts to store nuclear waste in Nevada for decades, and the Yucca Mountain project was shelved in 2010 under pressure from then-Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and President Barack Obama.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat who helped defeat a GOP-led effort to restore funding to Yucca Mountain last May, called it “the latest attempt to force nuclear waste down Nevada’s throats.”

Meanwhile, the state has sued the federal government over the half metric ton of plutonium secretly shipped from South Carolina to the Nevada National Security Site. That site is separate from but close to the Yucca Mountain site.

While U.S. leaders battle over where to ship the nuclear waste, the government says it has upgraded transportation containers and the way it hauls the material………..https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2019/10/14/critics-split-whether-tech-has-cut-nuclear-transportation-risk/3978815002/