N-shipment risks downplayed

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Aug 15, 2003 | by Robert Gehrke Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Shipments of radioactive nuclear waste are generally safe from terrorist attacks, but there are ways the shipments can be better protected, a congressional report said Thursday.

Large steel casks used to house the nuclear waste make it unlikely that any terrorist attack or accident during shipment would have widespread health effects, the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm, reported. It relied on earlier studies by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Energy Department.

"These studies repeatedly found that transportation containers would be very difficult to penetrate, and in the worst-case scenarios where they may be penetrated, only a small fraction of the material would be released," the GAO reported.

However, the GAO said the shipments could be made safer by minimizing the number of them, providing terrorists with fewer potential targets. The office noted that rail shipments can carry five times as much waste as trucks.

The GAO said waste from closed-down reactors should be shipped first, allowing them to be decommissioned, thus reducing the number of sites that need to be protected.

However, the contracts the government has signed with the utility companies that run the reactors may make changing the methods and prioritization of the shipments impossible.

John Coequyt, a senior analyst with the Washington-based Environmental Working Group, said he believes the GAO underestimates the severity of the threat posed by terrorists.

"How can we get this news that GAO isn't concerned about the possibility of an extraordinary event just the day after the FBI arrests someone trying to bring in missiles that could bring down a jetliner?" he said. "That's been our point all along, that this is very risky business, that terrorists who are after this country are serious, that they have very serious weapons."

But Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, chairman of the House Energy and Air Quality subcommittee, said in a statement that such objections to transporting nuclear waste are "a backdoor way to try and stop nuclear power," and said the GAO report should dispel concerns.

The federal government is in the process of developing a permanent nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nev., about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The facility is not likely to open until 2010.

When it does open, the shipment of nuclear fuel by rail and truck to Yucca Mountain will take up to 30 years. The Energy Department says there are more than 50,000 tons of the nuclear material at 72 sites in 33 states, many of them near urban areas in the Midwest and the East. By 2010, the department expects the volume to grow to 69,000 tons.

Moving that amount could take 175 shipments per year over 24 years.