Officials shift focus for rail route to Yucca

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Energy is refocusing its plans for a Nevada railroad to Yucca Mountain after the Walker River Paiute Indians announced that they no longer were interested in having nuclear waste shipped across their reservation, a DOE official said Wednesday.

A Northern Nevada railroad corridor that would have crossed tribal territory in Mineral County no longer will be considered, according to Ward Sproat, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.

DOE now will dedicate itself to completing studies of a rail corridor to the waste repository site that originates in eastern Nevada near Caliente, he said. "I wish they would have told us sooner, but they told us now," Sproat said of the Walker River Paiutes.

Following a vote by its governing council, the tribe announced on April 17 that it was withdrawing from environmental studies of the Mina rail corridor, named after a site south of Hawthorne.

Sproat said the Mina corridor studies essentially were done and still will be included in an environmental impact statement that DOE expects to make public in October, along with its assessment of the Caliente corridor.

But, Sproat said, the Mina route "essentially wouldn't be considered as a viable alternative. So Caliente most probably we will end up sticking with and providing in our formal record of decision."

The DOE official gave a presentation to a conference organized by the U.S. Transport Council, whose members are organizations tied to the shipping of nuclear materials.

The tribe's participation was the key element of a strategy to route nuclear waste cargo on rail through Northern Nevada, then south to the repository through old mining districts once served by rail.

Nuclear waste bound for Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would have utilized tracks that run through the middle of the Paiute community of Schurz. As a possible condition of the tribe's participation, the relocating of the rail line away from the town was being studied.

"I don't view this as a setback," Sproat said. "It is one less option that could have been cheaper and faster to build, but it is not something that is a major difficulty to us."

Gary Lanthrum, transportation director for the Yucca program, said the tribe's decision effectively closes the door on any rail route through western Nevada.

In the early days of the Yucca program, DOE identified a branch that essentially would go around the Walker River reservation.

But Lanthrum said in an interview that such a path was "longer and more problematic. It is very rough terrain, rougher than Caliente, and it makes (the route) as long or longer than Caliente."

Lanthrum also said he doubted there was time to develop other railroad options.

DOE officials and some nuclear shipping industry officials said the 280-mile Mina corridor could have proved a less expensive and more easily built alternative to the 319-mile Caliente corridor, where price projections have eclipsed $2 billion.

Critics of the route said the Mina corridor could expose more communities to waste shipments. Opposition began to build in cities such as Reno and Sparks.

Bob Halstead, a transportation consultant to the state of Nevada, said the Energy Department will have its hands full trying to develop the Caliente route.

"The assurances that we are hearing that this is not a big deal that Mina has dropped off, maybe that is good damage control, maybe that is wishful thinking," he said.

Halstead said the DOE faces engineering challenges at several locations along the Caliente corridor along with resistance from disgruntled ranchers and the sponsors of "City," a monumental desert art exhibit in Garden Valley.