Saturday, July 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Yucca routes debated

Panel considers nuclear waste safety

A panel of scientists and academics focused Friday on how the federal government can safely ship radioactive waste across the country to a planned national nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

Nevada officials told a 16-member National Academies panel that the Energy Department's plan for shipping the nation's nuclear waste from 70 sites across the country to Yucca Mountain was too incomplete to assess.

"There is no plan," said Bob Loux, chief of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency that is working to stop the project. "No one can do any planning until they know the mode and the route."

Energy Department officials said a new administrator has been put in charge of developing the transportation plan by the end of the year. Gary Lanthrum, a former environmental office manager for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management in Albuquerque, N.M., will take over Aug. 11, said Robin Sweeney, an official with the Yucca Mountain project in Las Vegas.

Ten members of the National Research Council panel spent Wednesday getting their first look at the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas that Congress picked last summer to store 77,000 tons of radioactive waste.

The entire group spent Thursday touring road and rail routes skirting the Las Vegas metropolitan area that could be used to ship casks containing spent nuclear fuel on the final leg.

They were trailed part of the way by protesters towing a trailer with a mock nuclear waste shipment container.

"There are understandable questions here about routes and modes of transportation," panel Chairman Neal F. Lane, a physics professor at Rice University in Houston, said during a break in Friday's hearing at the Crowne Plaza hotel.

"Our job is to understand and articulate what the risks are of transporting nuclear waste," he said.

Lane and study director Kevin Crowley said no conclusions have been made. The panel expects to issue a report in early 2005.