Thousands of tons of highly radioactive waste from commercial utility companies may begin moving through the rail system about four or five years sooner than expected, maybe as early as next year.

Many fire departments are not prepared, and because a private company is preparing to move the material rather than the U.S. Department of Energy, a law that requires training and equipment to be provided to prepare first responders everywhere along the route doesn't apply.

“I am absolutely drawing a line in the sand and my sword is out,” says John Eversole, chairman of the International Association of Fire Chiefs Hazardous Materials Committee and a veteran combatant for the fire service on Capitol Hill. “It's just too dangerous a situation not to have our people adequately trained and equipped.”

Storage overflow

About 47,000 metric tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel are awaiting the long-delayed opening of a proposed underground permanent storage facility by the U.S. Department of Energy at Yucca Mountain, a site in Nye County, Nev., 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The repository for spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste would be about 1,000 feet below the top of the mountain and 1,000 feet above the ground water. Originally scheduled to open in 1998, Yucca Mountain now is scheduled to open in 2010 at the earliest.

But eight utility companies that have run out of space to store their nuclear waste have formed a company to open a temporary, above-ground storage facility for spent nuclear fuel on the Goshute Indian Tribe's reservation in Skull Valley, Utah, 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. That company, Private Fuel Storage LLC, is in the final stages of its application for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate the facility.

Private Fuel Storage proposes to store spent nuclear fuels from utility companies' reactors at a dry-storage facility in Utah until DOE can move it to permanent storage at Yucca Mountain. If the facility is approved, Private Fuel Storage plans to start taking used nuclear fuels by rail as soon as construction is complete.

“The licensing process is ongoing,” says Sue Martin, public relations spokesperson for Private Fuel Storage. “We expect to know before the end of the year.” Once licensed, Private Fuel Storage expects an 18- to 24-month construction period for the facility. If approved, each year some 100 shipments of highly radioactive spent fuel will be hitting the rails in late 2006 or early 2007, if not sooner.

What bothers Eversole and other members of the IAFC Hazmat Committee is that long-standing federal provisions to provide equipment and training to first responders along the route of shipments to Yucca Mountain will not apply.

Training funds

Section 180-C of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act — the 1982 law that set the course for the federal government to provide a safe, permanent repository for our nation's radioactive waste — mandates that DOE will train and equip every public safety agency along the route of shipments to the federal repository.

Funding for training and equipping first responder organizations is to be provided to the states from the Nuclear Waste Fund, which DOE has been collecting from utility companies that pass along the cost as a surcharge to consumers on their utility bills. DOE has collected about $20 billion for the Waste Fund since 1983.

Although there is no specific deadline for compliance with 180-C, the industry and the federal government generally have agreed that a three- to four-year training period would be an appropriate amount of time to get emergency responders along the routes prepared, according to John Vincent, a nuclear waste management expert with the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based group representing the nuclear energy industry.

Private Fuel Storage will accelerate that schedule considerably, and it will not be required to comply with Section 180-C. As Vincent says, federal funding and private companies are apples and oranges. “A private company would never get federal funding from a federal organization like that,” says Vincent. “Commercial entity? It just doesn't happen.”

The opening of Private Fuel Storage's facility will have national impact, as there are 103 nuclear reactors in North America at 66 locations. Even so, Martin says the company hasn't decided what routes it will use to transport the nuclear waste: “Once we have determined what routes we will use, we will work with the appropriate state agencies to make sure that emergency responders will have the training they need.” As for funding the training of local first responders along the routes, she says “that hasn't been decided yet.”

“They're absolutely back-dooring this thing,” Eversole says. “If they're not willing to live with 180-C, then we're not willing to live with the transport…. I am going to ensure that everybody in this country knows that we're absolutely not prepared to handle that. We'll stop their whole program.”

Asked what provisions the company was making to provide detection devices, Martin says the dedicated trains will carry that equipment on board, as well as “security and someone with expertise in the materials being shipped.” In addition, railways will be the source of information about emergency response and coordination.

Providing personnel and equipment on board the trains to help handle emergency situations is “absolutely unacceptable,” says Eversole. “If there's a wreck of the trains and they're hurt or injured, who's going to protect my community? My community will not be prepared, nor will any other community. If they're not willing to comply with the provisions of 180-C, we're not going to tolerate it.”

Transport regulations

Although Section 180-C doesn't apply to this private company's plans, the same Department of Transportation and NRC regulations that have governed the transport of nuclear materials for years do. Private Fuel Storage will use the same NRC-certified transport casks that are engineered to protect the shipment from a release in an accident. It also will be required to notify states on the route of transports at least seven days before the material begins to move. The itinerary of specific shipments is classified, but states typically notify appropriate agencies along the routes of these shipments before they come through. The locations of all shipments also are tracked by satellite.

The Nuclear Energy Institute points to the industry's exemplary record of safety. During the last 40 years, more than 3,000 shipments of commercial nuclear fuel have moved across the country by highway and rail. There have been only eight accidents, notes Chandler L. van Orman, NEI's senior director, “but not one resulted in the release of any radioactivity.”

Each shipping cask for nuclear fuel transported by rail contains five tons of spent fuel protected by 120 tons of welded steel and other materials. “All accident conditions were postulated and went into the development of the regulations that govern how you would license a container,” says Vincent.

“My own personal conviction on this, because I've been dealing with [transport] for 30 years,” says Vincent, “is there will never be a release, no matter what kind of accident you want to postulate during the portion of transport. But that doesn't mean that you should not have previously established all the infrastructure for emergency response just as you would for the transport of all hazardous materials in the United States.”

IAFC Hazmat Committee member Gordon Veerman is fire chief of Argonne National Laboratories, DOE's largest research and testing facility, near Chicago. He doesn't contest the safety of the transports, but he supports Eversole's position: “If they ship the material, they should have the same requirements that the federal government has when they ship it. When you start looking at it, I'm sure it's going to be very well-dedicated and very well — laid out. But they should train emergency responders what to do if they have a problem and what to expect when a train comes through.”

Response basics

It's very likely that Private Fuel Storage will fail to convince states to be on the routes if states feel their local municipalities aren't prepared, Veerman says. “There's no doubt that it's a safe shipment, but it's psychologically not a safe shipment only because it's going to put a bad taste in their mouths. There's a stigma attached to radiation. It's one of those things that only through knowledge and training you can overcome and make things go smoothly.”

Veerman agrees that just carrying personnel and detectors on board won't be adequate. If there's a derailment of one of these trains, there's a better than 50% chance that whoever is on the train is going to be involved in the accident, too. Departments will need detectors to determine if they need to evacuate people from the area and how large a zone to evacuate.

“I think some basic go/no-go meters, which tell them if radiation is present or if you're in a safe zone, is what they need to make decisions there,” Veerman says, “because they're not going to have to do much if there is a train derailment. They're not going to have to get it back up on its feet. I think all they've got to do is determine what to do to protect their community.”

According to Veerman, most large cities already have the capability to respond to an accident of one of these shipments, but thousands of smaller communities do not.

In any case, if Private Fuel Storage doesn't have the funding to comply with Section 180-C, perhaps Congress could find some in the DOE Nuclear Waste Fund. Veerman wondered if such money could be advanced to prepare first responders along the routes. “Couldn't the Department of Energy be helping to fund this to make sure the people along the line get some training?” he asks. “It's all eventually going to wind up at Yucca Mountain.”

On paper, the NEI says that the Nuclear Waste Fund has a balance of about $12.4 billion, which includes funding for training first responders, but Congress raided this cookie jar in recent years to offset the federal deficit. “Technically, it's there, but we'll never see it,” says Paul Genoa, NEI's senior manager of state programs. “There are government securities in place — government securities which are drawing interest.”

What Is Spent Nuclear Fuel?

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, about 2,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel are created each year by some 103 nuclear reactors in the United States.

Each nuclear reactor's core contains about 200 fuel rods, which are metal tubes containing uranium pellets about the size of a fingertip. Utility companies shut down the reactor core once every 12 to 24 months and replace the oldest fuel rods with new ones. When removed from the core, these spent fuel rods are highly radioactive.

When power companies began building these nuclear reactors 40 years ago, the federal government promised to provide safe storage for their spent nuclear fuel — hence the development of Yucca Mountain in Nevada — which is now more than five years behind schedule. About 90% of the nuclear waste the federal government plans to store at Yucca Mountain is from commercial utility companies; the rest is largely high-level nuclear waste from the Department of Defense.

While waiting for the federal government to open its permanent nuclear waste storage facility, utility companies must store their spent fuel under 20 feet of water in on-site storage pools. About 28 utility companies have run out of space for storing used fuel in pools and have begun moving their oldest spent fuel to above-ground dry-storage containers, according to NEI.

“For whatever reason, some utility companies might not have the capability to put dry storage facility at their site, so they have an opportunity to contract for that service at the Private Fuel Storage facility in Utah,” explains NEI waste management expert John Vincent.

For More Info

Nuclear Energy Institute: www.nei.org

Private Fuel Storage LLC
www.privatefuelstorage.com

Skull Valley Documentary
www.kued.org/skullvalley/index_flash.html

Yucca Mountain Standards
www.epa.gov/radiation/yucca/about.htm#types_radioactive

U.S. Department of Energy: www.energy.gov