Is it going to be a Predicament?

The transport of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) and high-level radioactive wastes (HLW) to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site in Southern Nevada has the latent, to impinge on communities across the country. Research by the State of Nevada and the Department of Energy indicate that 43 states would be directly affected by thousands of SNF & HLW shipments to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository. At least 109 cities with populations over 100,000, plus thousands of small communities could be affected by the shipments.

The many doubts surrounding the transportation of nuclear waste to a repository make it extremely difficult to evaluate latent impacts and plan for contingencies. DOE and the nuclear industry point to the past history of spent nuclear fuel shipments as an signal of the innate safety of this type of transport activity. While it is true that, since 1962, there have been no radioactive releases as a result of transportation accidents, the amount of waste transported to a repository in the first full year of operations alone will surpass the total amount shipped in the United States for the past 30 years. In addition, the distances over which SNF and HLW would have to be shipped will be much greater for future repository shipments than for past shipments, which have often been shorter-distance transfers of spent fuel from one utility location to another. The State of Nevada has been investigating transportation issues associated with the repository for over 10 years. As a result of the State's work, a number of unsettled safety issues have been acknowledged. These issues suggest that DOE's transportation planning process is, at present, insufficient to declare safe and uneventful shipment of nuclear waste to a repository or some other short-term storage location. (www.yuccamountain.org)