Friday, May 09, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Waste shipping debate examines Baltimore tunnel fire

Nevada: Such an accident involving nuclear waste would endanger public

WASHINGTON -- When a freight train carrying hazardous fuels derailed and caught fire inside a downtown Baltimore tunnel in July 2001, the accident immediately got woven into debate over whether nuclear waste could be transported safely to Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

In the months afterwards, the state of Nevada and the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission performed studies to determine what would have happened had the train been carrying nuclear waste.

Their conclusions differed.

A state analysis concluded that a cask carrying radioactive spent fuel would have been breached by temperatures inside the Howard Street Tunnel. Escaping radioactive particles would have contaminated 32 square miles, increased the chances of cancer deaths for up to 28,000 people and cost $13.7 billion to clean up, consultants said.

At the conclusion of its study, a team headed by NRC analysts said a nuclear waste canister would have endured the fire, "and the health and safety of the public would have been maintained."

At the end of a three-hour meeting that dissected the Baltimore tunnel fire on Thursday, the sides remained no closer to consensus.

"The issue, I believe, is still largely open," said Robert Halstead, principal transportation consultant to the state of Nevada. "It seems to me there are specific differences of opinion about the performance of the cask that was evaluated."

While the studies might not settle the question, officials said they are yielding useful information as nuclear waste shipping campaigns slowly take shape.

Halstead said Nevada leaders plan to weigh data from the Baltimore studies for recommendations on how the NRC could update fire safety tests for cask designs that would be utilized to transport radioactive spent fuel to Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

NRC team leader Christopher Bajwa said the agency plans to examine the endurance of other cask designs to conditions modeled from the Baltimore fire.

NRC officials described their effort as the most comprehensive that could have been undertaken, incorporating studies from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.

In the accident, a tanker car carrying about 28,600 gallons of the flammable solvent tripropylene ruptured in the derailment and burned, paralyzing downtown Baltimore on July 18, 2001. Nevada leaders seized comparisons to nuclear waste.

Two months after the accident, Marvin Resnikoff, a physicist and Nevada nuclear waste consultant, performed analysis based on information about the duration and severity of the fire, previous studies and performance specifications of steel and steel-lead shipping casks.

Assuming fire temperatures at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in the tunnel, he concluded the steel and lead cask would have failed after 6.3 hours while the monolithic steel cask would have failed after 11 to 12.5 hours.

NRC simulations suggested that maximum temperatures were not maintained for long periods or evenly through the tunnel, said Kevin McGrattan, a fire modeling specialist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

"This accident may not be considered the worst case," McGrattan said.

Conservative modeling indicated it would have taken at least a day and a half of fire exposure to cause the cask to reach failure, said Harold Adkins of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Resnikoff said Nevada will be updating its analysis as it gains access to detailed data compiled by the NRC and its contractors.

Challenging NRC's analysis of cask performance, Resnikoff said he sticks by his conclusions of his original study. "If anything, they were too conservative," he said.