Details Are Few on Waste Site

An Energy Department official had no immediate answers Friday for a congressional panel seeking details of federal plans for shipping spent nuclear reactor fuel to a national radioactive waste dump in Nevada.

Gary Lanthrum, director of the department’s Office of National Transportation, said the Energy Department would make public in about six weeks whether it will use trains, trucks or a combination of both to get the nation’s most radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain.

“Once we make a decision about mode, then we’ll start talking about where routes will go,” Lanthrum said after testifying in Las Vegas before six House Transportation Committee and railroad subcommittee members.

The Bush administration and Congress in 2002 picked Yucca Mountain as the site to bury 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste now stored at commercial and military sites in 39 states.

The department will ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of this year for a license to open the repository in 2010.

Nevada is fighting the plan in federal court, and Reps. Jon C. Porter (R-Nev.) and Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) used Friday’s hearing to marshal support for another attempt to stop the project in Congress.

“Yucca Mountain is not a done deal,” Porter said during a break in the session chaired by Rep. Jack Quinn (R-N.Y.) and including Reps. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.), Julia Carson (D-Ind.) and Jim Matheson (D-Utah).

Berkley said she hoped the committee would back legislation to force a comprehensive Energy Department study about the safety of transporting nuclear waste before the department picks routes.

“The public should know how the government is going to protect people ... from a mobile Chernobyl,” she said, invoking the name of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.

She insisted the government should make public its plans to prevent terrorists from attacking trains or trucks hauling casks of highly radioactive waste across the nation.

Lanthrum responded that methods for protecting shipments were classified. But he said department officials could brief members of Congress behind closed doors.

Carson noted the Energy Department has said it might take 108,000 truck trips or about 3,000 train loads to get the nation’s nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. The department plans to accept shipments through 2038.

“Your concern is transport,” Carson told Lanthrum. “My concern is saving lives.”