Nuclear waste shipment to head through Missouri this year

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A train carrying high-level nuclear waste will travel through Missouri in a one-time shipment later this year, a State Emergency Management Agency official said.

SEMA radiological emergency planner Ed Gray said the shipment will be taken from West Valley, N.Y., to the northwestern United States. He said he did not know when the shipment would come through Missouri, except it would be this year.

Gray has been performing training sessions at locations where the shipment would pass, including one last week in Moberly in north-central Missouri. He said the sessions are to prepare local first-responders to secure the scene in case of an accident.

"We just want to be more cautious than not," Gray said.

Tim Jackson, a spokesman with the Department of Energy in Idaho, would not confirm that the waste would cross Missouri because the timing and routes of nuclear shipments are not disclosed for national security reasons.

However, Jackson said spent nuclear fuel rods from a site in West Valley, N.Y., needed to be transported to a laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The nuclear waste would then be taken to the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository in Nevada for permanent disposal.

The spent nuclear fuel rods are transported inside large casks made of steel, lead and other materials. The containers have survived a series of rigorous tests, Gray said.

The tests included a 30-foot drop onto a concrete pad, a 30-minute-burn in a 1,245-degree fire and an 80 mph rail-car crash into a concrete wall. There are also tests for underwater submergence and puncture by a steel rod.

The Nuclear Energy Institute said no leakage was recorded in any of the tests.

The Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico fired a weapon the NEI called 30 times more powerful than a typical anti-tank weapon at the cask. A quarter-inch diameter hole was created that the NRC said would leak one-third of an ounce of used nuclear fuel, according to the NEI.

Gray said a person could stand near a stopped train 24 hours a day for two weeks and receive less radiation than in a single chest X-ray.

Jackson said the New York to Idaho shipment was the same shipment that was canceled in October 2001.

At the time, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service organized a replica shipment and protested at locations along the proposed route, including Moberly. Kevin Kamps, a nuclear waste specialist at NIRS in Washington, D.C., said the 2001 route had the shipment entering Missouri near Hannibal and leaving from Kansas City.

Kamps claims the government's information about the safety of nuclear waste transport is incomplete.

He said the tests are misleading and discount realistic situations that could exceed the test situations. For instance, Kamps said, fires with diesel fuel can burn up to 1,800 degrees and railroad fires have lasted several days instead of only 30 minutes.

Since 1964, the NEI said more than 3,000 nuclear fuel shipments have been made with only four road accidents and four rail accidents. Those accidents caused no injuries, no deaths and no environmental damage, the NEI said.

Kamps said there had been 50 incidents, including ones where radioactive materials were found on the exterior of shipment containers. No injuries or deaths had been reported but "minimal effort" had gone into researching the incidents, Kamps said.

Kamps advocates halting the production of nuclear power because there is no easy way to dispose of the waste it creates. And he claims shipments of nuclear waste would be vulnerable to terrorist attacks and accidents.

"If we are going to move the waste one day, then it had better be for very good reasons," Kamps said.

A series of about 40 trains crossed the state in the late 1980s, carrying nuclear waste from the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Gray said those trains passed through St. Louis, Jefferson City, Sedalia, Independence and Kansas City and no one was exposed to radiation.

In 2001, Gov. Bob Holden halted trucks carrying a nuclear fuel shipment at the Illinois border, claiming the Energy Department's route failed to avoid rush-hour traffic in St. Louis and a baseball game in Kansas City. Holden also claimed the agency had notified officials that the waste would go through Iowa, not Missouri.

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Nuclear Energy Institute: www.nei.org/