Plan to Ship Nuclear Waste Across Mojave Desert Criticized

A proposal to divert hundreds of truckloads of radioactive waste through the far eastern reaches of San Bernardino and Inyo counties has upset political leaders and set off worries that even more hazardous nuclear cargo may someday follow the same path.

The proposed routes for transporting waste to a Nevada dump are outlined in an environmental assessment scheduled for publication next month by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Drafts of the report say it would be safer to ship the material from the East and Midwest to its ultimate destination near Las Vegas by train and truck on a circuitous route through Barstow, Yermo, Death Valley and other California locales. Now, nearly all the material goes by truck over Hoover Dam and through downtown Las Vegas.

The so-called low-level radioactive waste--the byproduct of 15 laboratories and nuclear weapons facilities nationwide--is destined for underground disposal at the vast Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. once detonated more than 900 nuclear devices.

“This is just an artificial route that is considerably longer than routes that keep the waste in Nevada,” said San Bernardino County Supervisor Jon Mikels. “It will divert a lot of these trucks onto Interstate 15, which has a tremendous amount of traffic. We absolutely are opposed to it.”

San Bernardino supervisors unanimously passed a resolution last month opposing diversion of the nuclear cargo.

The release of the federal report promises to heighten a 4-year-old conflict over shipment of the waste to the test site, about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

“Low level” is used by the federal government to define a broad category of waste produced in nuclear reactors, laboratories and weapons plants. Critics of the designation say it belies the fact that some of the material can be highly radioactive.

The waste bound for the Nevada site is produced mostly at former nuclear weapons plants in the East and Midwest.

Top officials in Nevada--including the governor and both U.S. senators--have urged in recent years that the material be delivered to the test site without passing through heavily populated Las Vegas.

That pressure redoubled in late 1997 when a truck driver found one container on his rig leaking. Although the liquid proved not to be radioactive, that leak and others spurred concerns that the truck trailers were not secure.

Nevada activists suggested that the Department of Energy consider an alternative: shipping the waste mostly on trains before shifting the containers to trucks for the final leg of the journey.

The current federal study follows that suggestion. It plots three alternatives, each with a transfer point, where containers would be lifted from trains onto trucks.

Two of the train-to-truck transfer points are Barstow and Yermo on I-15 in San Bernardino County. The third is Caliente, Nev., population 1,100, more than 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Up to seven truckloads a day might be shipped from these sites, although Energy Department officials predict fewer.

The study concludes that, in general, the train shipments would be safer and cheaper than moving the waste solely by truck. Extremely low levels of radiation inevitably leak from all truck shipments. But transporting the material by train reduces--by seven times--the chances that leaks might lead to cancer fatalities, the study says.

Radiation exposure risks would be reduced to the lowest level by using the route through Caliente, followed by the Yermo and Barstow alternatives, the report says.

Energy Department officials have attempted to downplay the significance of the environmental assessment. They said they cannot order shippers to use any route. Instead, they said the information is meant to be an unbiased, scientific view that encourages transport along the safest routes.

In an interview, however, the head of the team that compiled the report conceded that at least two alternative routes near Las Vegas were not even studied because of political pressure. And the agency has already directed the largest producer of waste bound for the test site--a closed weapons facility in Ohio--to ask its truck contractors not to transport waste through Las Vegas, said Michael Giblin, project manager for the Energy Department assessment.

Only Caliente appears prepared to buck the trend and, perhaps, lay out a welcome mat for the nuclear waste. The mayor and other civic leaders in the economically depressed town have been campaigning to build a train-truck transfer station there. In surrounding Lincoln County, voters last fall narrowly rejected an advisory measure opposing a nuclear waste facility.

The Caliente proposal is not without its shortcomings. Trucks leaving the town would have to take a looping 300-mile path to the test site, traversing four mountain passes, sometimes on a narrow, two-lane highway.

The high cost of the two-day round trip might induce shippers to use cheaper alternatives, via Barstow or Yermo, San Bernardino County officials worry.

In both Nevada and California, the debate over how to move the waste is seen as a forerunner to a much bigger battle to come.

That fight will determine whether the government can deposit high-level waste, which includes extremely radioactive material extracted from the cores of nuclear reactors, into a crypt at Yucca Mountain, which borders the Nevada Test Site.

Activists and politicians in both states worry that routes established today for low-level radioactive waste might then be used for the more dangerous material to come.

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Routes for Waste

A U.S. Department of Energy study proposes three alternatives to the current route by which low-level radioactive waste is trucked to the Nevada test Site. Two of the routes would run through California, with train-to-truck transfer points at Barstow or Yermo. A third would transfer the waste at Caliente, Nev.