Nuke Waste Route Sparks Local Outrage

Radioactive waste from a San Luis Obispo nuclear plant could one day be shipped by rail, truck or barge through Santa Barbara and Ventura county communities, a prospect that has enraged local lawmakers and environmentalists.

“There are too many unanswered questions, on security and safety, for my constituents and for people across the country,” said Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara), one of 117 House members who voted against a plan to permanently store 77,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada. “Pure and simple, it’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Capps is among a growing number of Southern California lawmakers who are concerned not only about burying the waste in Yucca Mountain but also about getting it there from 131 power plants and research labs across the country. Nine of those sites are in California, including the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo County, about 210 miles north of Los Angeles.

“The idea of putting radioactive waste on trucks or rail cars, then on a barge, then on trucks or rail cars again all through my district is a problem for me,” said Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who also voted against the Bush administration’s nuclear-waste burial plan Wednesday--one of only 14 Republicans to do so.

Critics of the plan are worried about spills, but also about terrorism--a threat that became a bigger concern for the nation’s nuclear facilities after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.

“Before we launch an armada of trucks, barges and trains carrying extremely toxic nuclear waste, we need a strategy to protect them against possible terrorist attacks,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), a member of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

Joe Davis, a Department of Energy spokesman, said safeguards are in place to protect radioactive waste shipments, which have occurred for 30 years: Transports are accompanied by armed guards and monitored 24 hours a day by escorts and by satellite, and shipment schedules are classified under federal security rules.

By 2006, the Diablo Canyon plant will have built up about 2,150 tons of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel that, eventually, will need to be transported to a secure storage facility.

Department of Energy officials say they want to move the material to Yucca Mountain through Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, using trains and trucks.

However, another option that the department studied calls for shipping the waste on barges through the Santa Barbara Channel and into the Port of Hueneme before transporting it by rail and trucks to the Nevada repository.

“That’s a rather frightening thought,” said Ventura County Supervisor John Flynn, who represents south Oxnard. “I would not want that coming into our county--period--and I would fight it all the way.”

The Yucca Mountain project, which must still receive Senate approval, requires that radioactive waste from around the country be sent, in 4,300 shipments over 24 years, to the burial site about 215 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The waste, now temporarily stored at sites in 39 states, comes from nuclear power plants and aircraft carriers, bomb factories and university research labs. Over time, it will emit millions of times more radioactivity than the Hiroshima bomb.

If approved, the Yucca Mountain site would open in 2010, but shipments probably would not begin for years after that, Davis said.

Furthermore, he said, those routes would not be decided without plenty of input from state governments and the public.

Transporting radioactive waste is safe, Davis maintained. In the department’s 30-year history of moving waste over 1.6 million miles, he said, there have been eight accidents. None of those resulted in the release of radioactive material that was harmful. “The environmental community is trying to use scare tactics, but the fact is there are 300 million hazardous-waste shipments right now,” he said.