Monday, March 24, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
A Clark County official fears a plan to transport low-level nuclear waste this summer through Las Vegas may open the door to more radioactive shipments.
The U.S. Department of Energy has forecast 706 defense-related radiation shipments to the Nevada Test Site this year. Of the total, 500 loads are due from a nuclear weapons facility in Fernald, Ohio, said Dennis Bechtel, director of Clark County's Nuclear Waste Management Office.
The DOE's Nevada office agreed with Fernald to test train-to-truck transfers of 18 to 24 shipments near Las Vegas this summer, Bechtel said.
The routes involved include Las Vegas Boulevard North and Interstate 15, then U.S. 95 to the Test Site. No route has been chosen, but transportation routes are within five miles of downtown Las Vegas.
The DOE believes shipping by rail, then transferring it to truck for the ride to the Test Site will be cheaper. But no one in Nevada was consulted about the project, because there are no specific regulations about government low-level waste shipments. There are no railroad tracks to the Test Site.
"Both the county and the state fear that if these loads come, it will open the door to temporary high-level nuclear waste storage, and could lead to a permanent transfer station if Yucca Mountain opens," Bechtel said.
Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is under study by the DOE for burying 77,000 tons of the most radioactive wastes from commercial power reactors and defense sites.
Because the DOE can't have Yucca Mountain ready before 2010 at the earliest, Congress has attempted to open a temporary nuclear waste storage site at the Test Site.
"We'd like to stop all this before it starts," Bechtel said, noting that a citizens advisory board in Ohio was informed of the transportation project, but a local counterpart was not.
Carl Gertz, in charge of DOE's low-level waste storage and disposal at the Test Site, said the Fernald shipments are about average and Ohio has been shipping to Nevada for years, much of it over Hoover Dam. The transfer experiment would test costs and minimize time and distance.
The demonstration would bring three shipments with two rail cars per shipment. Each car containing three or four 20-foot closed and lined truck containers filled with crushed drums and debris contaminated mostly with uranium-235 would need 18 to 24 truck loads to go to the Test Site.
Earlier, Gertz had said that if Congress funds another project, by 1999 trucks carrying radioactive metal from New York's Yankee Rowe defunct reactor might transfer at Lamb Boulevard to I-15 then to U.S. 95, traveling through the treacherous Spaghetti Bowl interchange.
Nevada officials from Gov. Bob Miller to Nuclear Waste Project Office Executive Director Bob Louox have promised to sue the DOE to keep the Yankee Rowe waste out.
"We're just afraid this year's trickle could turn into a flood of waste shipments," Bechtel said.
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