Abstract
When a train carrying hazardous materials caught fire on July 18, 2001, in a tunnel under downtown Baltimore, it burned for more than a day. Nearby residents choked on noxious fumes, local business slowed, and national Internet services momentarily sputtered.
But what if the cargo had included some of the nuclear waste that is expected to be moved to a central repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada?
According to the Association of American Railroads, spent nuclear fuel would be moved only on dedicated trains. But Bob Halstead, a transportation adviser for the state of Nevada, says that reality is somewhat different. “Some years ago the utilities and the Energy Department won a court case that said railroads could not require the use of dedicated trains,” he told me. And Energy's current draft Environmental Impact Statement for Yucca Mountain assumes that spent nuclear fuel casks could all be shipped in general freight service.
Under ideal circumstances, transporting casks of nuclear waste shouldn't pose much of a threat. The casks are designed to handle all sorts of road and rail hazards, from highspeed crashes to major derailments and bridge collapses.
But the Baltimore incident is a classic “low probability, high consequence” scenario. Nuclear waste casks are required to withstand “an engulfing fire” (burning at 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit) for 30 minutes. What would happen if some were caught in a long, hot fire like that in Baltimore? The current design standards for high-level nuclear waste containers set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) might be adequate in most circumstances, but put a fire inside a tunnel, add combustibles from other cars, and train tunnel fires can get much, much hotter.
The Baltimore Sun reported that firefighters described steel cars in the tunnel as glowing orange, an indication that the fire was as hot as 1,500 degrees. The fire started on July 18, burned through the night, and continued well into the next day–far longer than the 30 minutes the casks are designed to withstand.
“Had the train carried nuclear waste, it could have been a mobile Chernobyl,” said Kevin Kamps, a nuclear specialist for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “Some of the worst train catastrophes have been tunnel fires, and [Energy] has not even declared what its routes are going to be.”
Kamps said that Energy plans to make its train routes final before disclosing them to the public–when it's too late for any public input.
July 20, 2001: Three days into the Baltimore train fire, an extra engine sits outside the tunnel, waiting to pull cars from inside.
“The whole thing would be a perilous game of radioactive Russian roulette on our roads and rails,” he concluded.
In September 2001, Radioactive Waste Management Associates released a report on the hypothetical radiological consequences of a Baltimore-like accident involving a spent nuclear fuel cask. Report authors Matthew Lamb and Marvin Resnikoff conclude that such an accident could result in a significant release of cesium 134 and cesium 137. And current Transportation Department regulations would allow spent nuclear fuel casks to have been on such a train.
The report also details the cost of cleaning up a train fire involving nuclear waste: a cool $13.7 billion to deal with a 62-square-kilometer contaminated area (including 9.9 square kilometers of heavy contamination).
According to Bob Halstead, the Baltimore tunnel fire is “one of the most analogous case studies someone could have ordered up. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this, if they want to learn them.
“I don't know of a credible analysis that says that regulatory casks won't fail in a fire that runs more than 22 to 24 hours,” he said.
After modeling the fire's plume, Halstead concluded that if there had been a nuclear transport cask in the tunnel, about half of the volatile and radioactive material would have escaped. The other half would have “plated” the tunnel, requiring later cleanup.
Even conservative estimates–based on a limited “puff” release–would have resulted in significant radiation exposures in the first 24 hours that would have “contaminated a lot of people over a large area,” he said.
Halstead does not believe his cleanup numbers are unrealistic or alarmist, noting that numbers generated by the nuclear industry for similar accident scenarios predict huge time frames for cleanup.
“This was exactly the low-probability, high-consequence accident that the regulations address,” Halstead said. And while the Baltimore route is not a primary path for radioactive shipments, it could be used to move spent fuel from at least one nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs. “There are no special rails or even trains being proposed for these shipments. The nuclear transport cars will be mixed in with regular freight cars,” he said.
NRC standards for nuclear waste casks also haven't been updated since 1947, and combustibles being transported today can burn at higher temperatures than when the standards were developed. And the nuclear transport cars of tomorrow are being designed to hold even more waste. A watchdog group, Yuccamountainfacts.org, says that the reliability data on new, yet-to-be-built casks is based on computergenerated disasters, not real ones, as well as data from as far back as 1980. Current safety guidelines do not take into account modern-day disaster scenarios, such as terrorist acts, or the fact that new casks are likely to be both lighter and larger. “There is no way to know if casks of larger size will behave the same way,” the group points out.
Could trains carrying nuclear waste avoid tunnels altogether on their way to Yucca Mountain? According to a report by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects–no. Tunnels are a prominent feature of the Union Pacific's main line through southeastern Nevada, the most likely route for shipments using a newly built rail spur or an “intermodal” transfer facility at Caliente. According to the agency, there are eight tunnels on the Union Pacific route between the Utah-Nevada border and Caliente, and seven tunnels between Las Vegas and Caliente. And if the rail spur running to the repository originates between Carlin and Battle Mountain in northern Nevada, rail shipments would travel through as many as five tunnels after entering Nevada at West Wendover.
These are just the tunnels that shipments would have to travel through in remote areas of Nevada; there are many more along other routes being considered. Studies by Nevada and Energy include 43 states through which shipments are expected to travel, including 109 cities with populations greater than 100,000. Depending on how shipments are conducted, there could be as many as 96,300 shipments of spent nuclear fuel moving from civilian nuclear power plants, as well as from Energy Department weapons facilities.
Who should be concerned? Majority Whip Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada, hopes that everyone will start “flexing their muscles about the reestablishment of nuclear power in this country, that we recognize first that there has to be something done with the waste associated with nuclear power.” In a press conference last July he noted that under proposed plans, the 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste destined for Yucca Mountain will pass within a mile of 60 million people.
Given heightened concern about terrorist attacks at nuclear power plants, however, Reid's solution to the waste problem doesn't sound ideal, either:
“What we should do with nuclear waste is leave it where it is,” he said. “The scientists say it would be safe for a hundred years. And then, during that period of time, there might be some idea as to what could be done with these spent fuel rods.”