Safety Data to Be Agency’s Ace at Fuel Rod Meeting

When the Department of Energy comes to town on Thursday, it will be armed with strong assurances for a hostile audience that the nuclear cargo it wants to ship through Long Beach is safe.

“There has never been an accident involving a cask licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission where there has been a release of radioactivity, and (that’s) a remarkable safety record,” said James Gaver, spokesman for the federal agency, who will be part of an eight-person team dispatched for the 2 p.m. public meeting.

The team will probably dust off calculations, which, they claim, show the chance of radioactive leakage from shipping casks is nearly infinitesimal.

Once in 300 Million Years

The Energy Department has previously argued there is a 1-in-3-billion probability that an accident involving such steel-and-lead casks would cause a radiation-related cancer. In a New York City case involving nuclear cargo similar to that which would come to Long Beach, federal officials estimated that a major accident or sabotage serious enough to cause deaths and extensive property damage would occur only once in 300 million years.

Opponents have argued that similar odds were also proffered before the near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979, in which radioactive gases escaped through the plant’s venting system, and that the chance of a catastrophic accident increases with every mile nuclear waste is hauled.

Marvin Resnikoff, a nuclear physicist for the Sierra Club’s Radioactive Waste Campaign, has said that government forecasts of nuclear accidents defy common sense. “Based on 40 years’ experience, with what certainty do you think you can predict out 300 million years? I think the (chance of error) would be extremely large,” he said.

The Department of Energy announced on Jan. 17 that it planned to move 18 shipments of spent, highly radioactive fuel rods from an experimental nuclear reactor in Taiwan to the Port of Long Beach. The rods would then be trucked to South Carolina for reclamation.

A week after the announcement--following emotional protests by civic and anti-nuclear groups and after learning that the Port of Los Angeles had rebuffed the same shipments last May--officials of the city-run port notified the Energy Department that public concern about safety was too strong to allow the shipments to be unloaded here.

Mayor Ernie Kell said last week that the city does not have the legal authority to stop the shipments, but that it does have the right to insist that the shipments are handled safely. In test cases in other states, the authority of the federal government over nuclear shipments has been upheld.

Kell and several members of the City Council and Harbor Commission have said they know too little about the shipments to judge their safety.

‘An Open Mind’

“I don’t feel I have enough information about that,” Kell said. “I will listen with an open mind.”

Councilman Warren Harwood said he did not think the City Council was “pro-nuclear or anti-nuclear. I think the council’s primary concern is that it wants to be totally knowledgeable and assured that these shipments are safe.”

The council has a history of welcoming ships to the Long Beach Naval Station that could carry nuclear weapons. But Kell said the proposed shipments of nuclear waste are a “totally different issue. The Navy is for national defense, but there’s absolutely no reason these shipments have to go through the port.”

There has been a big difference, too, in advance warning from federal officials, Kell said. “When the Navy initially brought the ships in we were briefed long before the press release. I think the Department of Energy’s handling of public relations has been clumsy at best.”

The Thursday meeting at the Harbor Department building at 925 Harbor Plaza will begin with a presentation by the federal officials. The team will include representatives from the Energy Department in Washington and South Carolina, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation and private contractors working on the fuel shipment project, said Gaver, the Energy Department spokesman. He said the presentation will emphasize safety and the need to bring used nuclear fuel back to this country so it cannot be used by other countries to make weapons.

Question-and-Answer Session

After the presentation, the federal officials will answer questions by representatives of the city, labor unions and other local agencies. Questions from the public will be allowed after that, a port spokesman said.

During the meeting, Gaver said, local officials will be assured that the 18 shipments--each with two 22-ton, 17-foot-long casks--will be inspected for radioactivity and leaks at their port of origin. Once in Long Beach, he said, the casks will be inspected by the Coast Guard, and local or state officials may also examine them. Armed guards will escort the cargo while in port, but not after it leaves, said another Energy Department spokesman, Bill Pearson.

The California Highway Patrol must be notified at least 72 hours before each shipment arrives, and police and fire departments along the shipments’ yet-undetermined interstate highway route will be notified by the highway patrol at least 36 hours before arrival, said CHP Sgt. Gary Richey.

The CHP may inspect trucks carrying casks while the trucks are in port and after they leave it, Pearson said. Each truck would carry a single cask. If any problems are detected with the truck or cargo, Pearson said, state officials can stop the shipment.

If an accident occurs, Pearson said, a trained response team of Energy Department employees and private contractors is in place in California.

Stainless Steel, Lead

Each shipping cask will carry about 15 uranium fuel rods weighing a total of 2,000 pounds, Pearson said. The casks, an updated variety recently licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are made of two stainless-steel shells with a six-inch lead shield in between, he said.

Such detailed information has not yet been forwarded to the city, however. So far, city officials said, they have been given only general assurances that the fuel rods are safe. A Jan. 24 letter to Kell from S. R. Foley Jr., assistant secretary for defense programs for the Energy Department, said, “The transportation of radioactive materials is a low-risk activity by any level of comparison.”

Robert M. Jefferson, who helped compile what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission says is the country’s best data base on nuclear shipments and accidents, also said fuel rod shipments have been safe.

“Since the Western world started moving these rods in 1964, there has never been an accident in rail, road or water where there has been a release of radioactive material,” said Jefferson, an engineer who was the manager of the Transportation Technology Center at the Albuquerque, N.M.-based Sandia National Laboratories, an Energy Department contractor, until last year. There are perhaps 3,000 such shipments a year in the non-Communist world, he said.

The United States has had about 150 rod shipments a year since 1964, Jefferson said. Since 1971, there have been only five accidents in this country involving trucks or railroad cars carrying fuel rods, and no shipping casks were heavily damaged in those mishaps, he said.

Worst Accident in Tennessee

In California, there have been 46 shipments of nuclear rods without an accident since mid-1980, when the CHP began keeping such records, Richey said.

This country’s worst fuel rod accident occurred in Tennessee in 1971, when a tractor-trailer rig ran off a highway at 70 m.p.h., killing its driver and throwing its cask into a ditch, Jefferson said. The driver was killed, but there was no damage to the cask.

“Compare that,” said Jefferson, “to other things we routinely ship. We kill 20 people a year through natural-gas pipeline leaks, 10 to 15 with shipments of gasoline, and 15 to 20 a year shipping explosives.”

The Sierra Club’s Resnikoff, however, said he takes little comfort in such comparisons. Resnikoff, author of a 1983 book on the transportation and storage of nuclear waste, insists that fuel rod shipments are risky and often unnecessary.

The Energy Department has said it will truck the fuel rods bound for Long Beach cross-country primarily to save time and money. But Resnikoff said such overland shipments should be avoided because each trip increases the chance of an accident that could kill people and cause billions of dollars in damage.

Range of Accidents

The accident rate of interstate trucks has been consistent at about 1.5 for each 1 million miles traveled, he said. And the rate for trucks with heavy cargo is about three times as high, he said. At that rate “quite a few” accidents of varying severity can be anticipated, he sid.

And, Resnikoff insists, federal officials know too little about what would happen if, in a high-speed accident, a cask used to carry rods crashed sideways against a solid object, such as a bridge, or the casks were involved in a lengthy fire aboard a ship. No physical tests have been done on casks now in use, he said, although he acknowledged that some tests were performed on their predecessors.

In one test, a cask was dropped 2,000 feet and did not crack, he said. In another, a truck was rammed head-on at 60 m.p.h. into a concrete wall and the cask emerged with little damage. “That was an impressive test, but it’s not the only kind of accident that can happen,” he said.

Resnikoff said he would recommend that casks be rammed sideways into a solid, pointed object, because a cask, like a beer can, collapses more easily when pressure is applied to its side. Resnikoff would also crush a cask to see precisely how much pressure it can withstand, and burn one in kerosene for several hours to simulate a disaster at sea.

Jefferson--who helped conduct the 60-m.p.h. truck test while at Sandia and a follow-up test at 84 m.p.h. that also resulted in no leak of radioactive fuel--said tests on casks and calculations based on proven engineering principles show cask shipments are safe.

Margins of Safety

“The next time you go on an airplane consider that it has a margin of safety of 1.1, which means the strength of its materials is 1.1 times the expected stress its airframe will be subjected to in its lifetime,” Jefferson said. “Then compare that with this type of cask, which has a design safety margin on the order of 5 to 10.”

He said a fire test like the one Resnikoff would require was conducted at Sandia. A cask suspended in the air was heated on all sides by a 500-foot kerosene fire for two hours. The lead in the cask melted, as predicted, but it never leaked, he said.

Fuel rod casks are unlikely to be caught in fire at sea lasting more than a few minutes, because they cannot be legally carried along with fuel shipments, he said. A highway fire that could cause a radioactive leak is even less likely, Jefferson said, because fuel carried by the average tanker truck would sustain a fire for only eight minutes.