Nuclear Highway: Radioactive On The Road

(AP)  Motorists across the South could soon be sharing the highway with nuclear waste generated decades ago in developing the first atomic bomb.

Tons of this so-called "transuranic waste" have been waiting for years to leave what is now the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a final home in New Mexico, where the government has built a permanent vault in salt beds nearly a half-mile deep.

The material includes clothes, lab equipment, tools and scrap. All was contaminated by manmade isotopes such as plutonium.

Most from Oak Ridge can be handled without special gear, but some requires heavy protective shielding, officials said.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates it will take 60 to 120 shipments a year for three years to move all the material from Oak Ridge to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. There are about 74,000 cubic feet of waste to be moved out of Oak Ridge, enough to fill 10 buildings.

The 27-hour, 1,400-mile journey from Oak Ridge will pass through Chattanooga to Birmingham, Ala., across Mississippi and Arkansas to Pecos, Texas, and north to Carlsbad. The route avoids Memphis and Nashville.

The DOE has contracted a fleet of specially designed tractor-trailers and highly trained drivers for what is being called a "campaign" to collect this material from nuclear weapons sites around the country. The agency will spend $20 million over five years just on shipping.

Already, some 6,800 truckloads of material have been brought to WIPP from DOE sites in Washington state, Idaho, New Mexico and South Carolina. Shipments from Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago are next.

During a briefing Monday in Oak Ridge, the DOE and its contractors emphasized the safety of these shipments and precautions that have been taken. Two big rigs were showcased in what was the first stop in a public education tour along the route to New Mexico.

Each trailer is outfitted with huge containers or casks. One trailer has three large silo-shapped casks for less radioactive material. The other has a single stainless-steel and lead-lined cask for higher rated material.

"The cask is tested to be dropped. It is tested by fire. It is tested by water to try and penetrate it and we have not been able to do that," said DOE-Carlsbad project manager William Mackie.

Mackie said the stainless steel cask should not separate from the trailer in a rollover accident, while the three 20,000-pound rounded casks are designed to break away - in which case "the thing we worry about is not a radiation leak, but it is any car or person that is in the way."

Each truck is operated by a two-member team trained in the requirements of the rig, radioactivity and how to deal with an emergency. "Everything has got to be just right," said driver Tommy Cash of Carlsbad.

The tractor-trailers are equipped with tracking devices for DOE and state emergency officials to monitor.

In Tennessee, each rig also will have a Tennessee Highway Patrol escort. Local emergency response agencies along the route have received training and radiation detection equipment.

"We have radioactive material moving on the highway all the time," said Elgan Usrey, assistant director of the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency. But this is different, he said. "It is the larger quantity."

Tennessee environmental officials will not allow transuranic waste to be buried in the state. The New Mexico facility, completed in the late 1980s, opened in 1999.

The first Oak Ridge shipments could begin this fall, possibly by September. New Mexico environmental officials have approved the Tennessee shipments, but approval is pending with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Bobby St. John, a contractor spokesman from WIPP, said the shipments are unlikely terrorist targets because the material "is all solid. It is all debris waste. You really can't do anything with it. This isn't suitable for dirty bombs. Not to mention the containers are so robust you couldn't get into one."

Gawkers are a greater concern. "We don't want to be the cause of an accident because somebody is trying to figure out what is going on," he said.

[mechengr75]

As part of the engineering team that design, tested, licensed, and built the transportation packages for the WIPP site, all of these packages (TRUPACT-II, HalfPACT, and the 72B cask [picture above]) are licensed by the NRC under Title 10, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 71 (10 CFR 71). These packages have been thoroughly tested (mulitple times) as aprt of the licensing process to ensure no release of ANY radioactive material (i,e., leaktight) that could affect the environment or anyone in the general public. For reference, there are two types of material headed for the WIPP: contacted-handled (CH) and remote handled (RH) waste, which require bilogical shileding (e.g., lead). For the 72B cask above, RH waste is transported. For all other WIPP packages, no biologinal shileding is requied.

For more information on the WIPP packages, visit the WIPP website at http://www.wipp.energy.gov/.

[eggy1620]

Radioactive waste moves along our roads every single day. They%u2019re called nuclear medicine patients. And they teach your children (gasp!)

[eggy1620]

This is not low-level waste. Posted by Nmlost

Yes, this is low-level waste. It meets the definition in the regulations. High-level waste is spent fuel from power plants.

[impeach__w]

Uncle Sam says one thing and does another some times, don''t he? Posted by NMlost

Where you been the last 200 years much less the last eight?

[radman5000]

Breaker ,breaker good buddy, we got ourselves a real hot Convoy.keep your eyes out for them smokies

[newview08]

Why do Americans keep praising countries like France who''s nuclear energy program is far more developed than ours, and then cry about nuclear materials being transported across their country as they attempt to do the very same thing? They cry about electricity from coal, they cry about how ecosystems are damaged by dams, they cry about just about every form of energy imaginable short of wind power. And even then they somehow manage to ignore how all those wind turbines are produced, as if they somehow spring from mother earth from little recycled composite fiber beans. Delivering reliable power to over 300 million people is an enormous task, and I think people in this country should be more appreciative of the hard working folks who keep the lights on.

[rf35]

You realize it''s probably the public affairs guys in the government that are getting this info to the networks. This is the kind of stuff we are required to release to the public.
On another note, I''m glad I''m moving from NM to England this fall.

[newview08]

Agreed, why would CBS tell people what to look for? Are they stupid? Why is the Federal Government not stepping in when information like this is made public? Even the bad guys can figure out that these are decoys, the real stuff is going to be transported in a "Babys R Us" truck or something benign like that, and they''ll be easy to spot out in the middle of nowhere. Thanks for the heads-up guys, real patriots you are.

[johnnymac73]

I used to drive these, but i think the radiation ruined the vision in my third eye.

[holy-joe-722]

Just what we need....CBS tells everyone what the trucks look like, which ones are most radioactive, where they are traveling and how many each year. Now if (or when) there is an accident because of gawkers or heaven forbid, terrorists, CBS and the others will be there to cover how irresponsible the truckers were. Great.