Miniseries points to real danger

A train packed with a toxic load loses its brakes leaving Idaho as it heads toward Denver.

Another train tries to stop the loaded freight cars as they slow while climbing a steep hill, but it cannot connect. Frantic railroad workers make a desperate attempt to connect the brake lines dangling inches from the track as the train plummets toward Denver to no avail.

What nobody knows about this train is that it carries a secret nuclear weapon slipped into a freight car by an unscrupulous waste hauler.

When the inevitable wreck occurs, an atomic mushroom cloud rises against Denver's skyline.

While the TV movie "Atomic Train" is fiction, the film points to a very real danger -- even though NBC scrubbed any mention of nuclear waste from the film. If Nevada becomes the high-level radioactive dumping ground for the nation, a steady stream of nuclear waste shipments will travel U.S. roads bringing it here.

The plot behind the movie starring Rob Lowe also points to the very real politics behind hauling waste from nuclear power plants on the East Coast and in California to Nevada.

The original script combined nuclear wastes, a nuclear weapon and chemicals on the runaway train. All references to nuclear wastes disappeared from the film during harried editing this week by NBC.

Critics are accusing the nuclear industry of putting pressure on NBC, owned by General Electric Co., which built about a third of the nuclear plants operating in the United States today.

"The original script was so inaccurate," NBC spokeswoman Rebecca Marks said. "We felt it was irresponsible not to change it after a couple of network executives viewed the film this week. We still have an atomic bomb on board."

Asked if anyone from General Electric had contacted the network, Marks replied, "I could not comment on Jack Welch's activity." Welch is chairman of GE's board and CEO since 1980.

However, a spokesman for GE Nuclear Energy President Steven R. Specker, who sits on the board of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying arm, said Specker did not influence the network's changes to the film. "He did not have any contact with NBC," spokesman John Redding said.

The consumer and nuclear watchdog group Public Citizen condemned the network for "corporate cleansing" by erasing any mention of nuclear waste, although Congress could pave the way for trainloads of highly radioactive waste to come to the Nevada Test Site for temporary storage by 2003.

In fact last year the Nuclear Energy Institute gave $15.5 million to members of Congress to support temporary nuclear waste storage at the Nevada Test Site. GE was the largest contributor supporting nuclear interests.

That makes Sen. Richard Bryan, D-Nev., a little skeptical when he hears the denials of influence-peddling at the network. The nuclear industry is terrified of the image of a trainload of nuclear wastes crashing into an American city, he said. "I think it is the nuclear industry moving into high gear for damage control. The last thing they want the public to see is high-level nuclear waste involved in an accident."

The problem is, he said, that this fiction is not that far removed from real-life possibility.

The Federal Railroad Administration's Office of Safety Analysis reported rail accidents typically number 2,500 a year and increased nearly 5 percent between 1997 and 1998. About 3.7 rail accidents per million train miles occur each year, so an accident involving a train carrying nuclear waste is more than just a statistical probability.

Of 1,130 train collisions between 1993 and 1997, 870 were caused by human error, the administration office said.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, freshman Democrat from Nevada, began warning her House colleagues about those possibilities long before NBC started having qualms about the original plot.

Berkley reminded her fellow congressmen in a "Dear Colleague" letter April 28 that if the temporary nuclear waste storage bill passes and the "inevitable crash occurs, how will you explain to your constituents that you voted to send the 'Atomic Train' through your congressional district?"

Berkley -- along with her colleagues Bryan, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev. -- has been drumming up opposition to temporary nuclear waste storage in Nevada as legislation wends it way through Congress.

The House of Representatives has passed the bill and the Senate is likely to follow suit. However, President Clinton has vowed to veto the bill, and there doesn't appear to be enough support in the Senate to override the promised veto.

If the bill were to pass and highly radioactive wastes begin crossing the country in June 2003, trucks loaded with hundreds of containers will run through 43 states to reach the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, Berkley reminded House members.

And if Yucca Mountain is approved as a permanent nuclear repository 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, up to 100,000 loads of high-level radioactive material will pass through the backyards of 50 million people who live a half mile or less from approved rail and truck routes for 30 years.

Although it is unlikely that a U.S. city will vanish under an atomic cloud under the worst case as shown in the TV movie, an accident in the future involving nuclear waste is possible. The reasons lie in the fudge factors allowed in the transportation of such waste.

Nuclear weaponsHow does the federal government ensure safe transportation of nuclear weapons and wastes across the country?

DOE spokeswoman Christina Kielich issued a fact sheet on shipping radioactive materials from the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters in April, just as the movie's promotional spots started hitting the airwaves.

One of the first points the DOE makes is that nuclear weapons and nuclear waste are never shipped in the same cargo, even though that premise now has been removed from the movie.

Even as edited, the type of accident shown in the movie can't happen, the DOE says, because nuclear weapons are not transported by train.

No nuclear weapon has moved on a train since 1985, according to the DOE. Weapons are shipped by 18-wheel trucks designed and built for the purpose. And the weapons never leave the sight of their government handlers. By moving nuclear weapons on the highways, officials can abruptly change times and routes if the weather or a terrorist threat surfaces, explained Nancy Harkess, DOE spokeswoman in the Nevada Operations Office.

In addition, the fact sheet notes, nuclear weapons on the move are not armed with radioactive material and cannot create a nuclear explosion.

But transportation consultant Robert Halstead, who works for the state of Nevada fighting plans to bring nuclear waste here, asks why the movie's premise couldn't happen. "After all, the nuclear weapon was put on the train illegally," he noted after Hammer Productions staff, the film's maker, called him.

To bolster its argument, the DOE points to the safety record of nuclear weapon shipments.

Since 1975 the agency's Transportation Safeguards Division has recorded 100 million miles of shipping nuclear weapons, components and special nuclear materials without a loss or compromise of any shipment or release of radioactive materials, it says.

That is so far as anybody knows, Joe Strolin, socioeconomic director for Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, says. "It's all top secret. They don't open up their records."

The DOE does allow that an accident could trigger a blast from the high explosives that are part of each nuclear weapon to ignite the nuclear reaction -- especially if gasoline or diesel fuel causes a fire.

That's not a nuclear explosion but it's still dangerous, and the DOE recommends excluding people for a 2,000-foot radius if a nuclear weapon is involved in an accident because of the threat.

High-level wasteWhile not as dangerous or scary as a rogue nuclear weapon, high-level nuclear waste shipments have the potential of causing a lot of damage if any of the radioactivity ever escaped from a shipment. In fact the waste that comes from nuclear power plants can be more harmful, because it remains radioactive thousands of years longer than a nuclear bomb.

It doesn't have to take thousands of years to do any damage, however. An unshielded irradiated fuel element can kill a person within three minutes.

Understandably the precautions for transporting that waste are great. The question is whether they are great enough.

Still-radioactive reactor fuel is put in a metal cask known as a "Type B" that has been tested under normal and severe accident conditions. Truck casks have multi-layered walls to reduce radiation exposure.

The casks can weigh up to 23 tons and be about 17 feet long, most of the bulk to shield people and the environment from radiation.

Unlike nuclear weapons, high-level nuclear waste is transported by train as well as truck. A rail cask can contain about seven times the load of the average truck canister and is likely to have layered walls up to 11 inches thick and weigh as much as 100 tons.

How severe a test did the casks currently in use undergo? In 1975 Sandia National Laboratory near Albuquerque, N.M., conducted the following experiment on a truck cask:

* A 30-foot free fall onto an unyielding surface.

* Burned in a fire at 1,475 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.

* Dropped 3 1/2 feet onto a 6-inch steel spike.

* Immersed for 8 hours in 3 feet of water.

While the cask did not fail, five of six safety latches on it popped loose, a Sandia report said. In a real accident, that could allow radiation to escape.

Since then no casks for high-level radioactive waste have been tested. The DOE does not require them to be tested in the real world, and nuclear shipping companies do the testing using computer simulation, Strolin said.

Either the DOE or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could require full-scale tests, but the nuclear industry says it costs too much. So far the DOE and the nuclear industry have agreed not to do full-scale tests on transportation casks.

The DOE likewise is not required to conduct full-scale tests on casks being designed to carry high-level nuclear wastes to Yucca Mountain, if it opens. The new casks are being designed to hold more nuclear wastes in order to reduce the number of trips to a repository.

As with nuclear weapons, the DOE points to the safety record in the transportation of highly radioactive waste.

Some 2,500 loads of nuclear reactor fuel, just like the kind that could some day come to Yucca Mountain, have been transported around the country in the past 30 years, DOE noted, with no significant loss or release of radioactive materials.

So who can argue with a record like that?

Nuclear transportation consultant Halstead is quick to do so. Halstead believes that anything is possible once more nuclear waste shipments start moving more often.

Halstead, who has consulted for Wisconsin, Texas and now Nevada, says that no one can guarantee shipping containers are safe.

The DOE recognized as far back as 1986 that military fighters training over Yucca Mountain, a terrorist act and natural gas lines sharing railroad corridors pose dangers, Halstead says.

Another worry nuclear waste shippers should consider is the many bridges and tunnels and the threat of their collapse in an earthquake, Halstead said. Nevada is the third most seismically active state in the nation, behind California and Alaska.

Since no federal agency requires armed guards to ride on trains carrying nuclear waste, the rail cars could travel normal freight and passenger routes, Halstead noted.

And if radiation did escape, it would be costly.

The DOE admits that people along a nuclear transportation route -- the public, truck drivers or emergency crews -- could receive excessive radiation exposure during shipping.

The casks under design are expected to emit 10 millirems per hour, equal to the radiation from a single chest X-ray, when they are intact. Three feet away from the casks, radiation doses should reach background levels.

However, a person sitting in a car gridlocked in traffic next to a cask containing nuclear waste could get a radiation dose equal to four chest X-rays if the traffic jam lasted long enough.

If an accident cracked open a cask, up to 8 acres around the site would have to be evacuated and kept free of people until it was cleaned up.

The cleanup, the last DOE estimated in 1985, would cost $620 million in a rural area and more than $2 billion in an urban area.

Low-level wasteWhile the danger of radioactive exposure is least from low-level nuclear debris -- the type that is already transported to the Nevada Test Site -- the chances of exposure from the still radioactive clothing, soils and other waste is greater, because fewer precautions are taken.

The waste is usually placed in 55-gallon drums that are then packed in metal boxes and put on trucks.

Leaks from low-level nuclear shipments can and have happened. In December 1997 four separate white metal containers filled with contaminated sludge en route to the Test Site leaked. One container released almost two gallons of liquid, which proved not to be radioactive. The truck driver stopped and isolated the load in Kingman, Ariz.

The DOE halted all shipments from the uranium processing plant in Ohio that sent the shipment and the low-level radioactive waste shipping containers were redesigned. The shipments are expected to resume to the Test Site at any time.

What happens if more than a leak, such as an accident, occurs?

The DOE has trained hundreds of police, highway patrol troopers, firefighters, paramedics, doctors, nurses, even morticians, to prepare for a low-level nuclear accident.

In the case of rural areas such as Nye County, where the Test Site and Yucca Mountain are located, the DOE has not only trained emergency crews but provided equipment, including radiation monitors.

The nuclear materials shipped across country are limited to either interstate highway systems or state-designated alternative routes or a combination of both, with the aim of exposing the fewest number of people.

For Caren Levenson, PTA legislative chair at John C. Vanderburg Elementary School, it's not a matter of what level of radioactivity the shipments might contain. They don't belong passing near schools, she says. And one route that was suggested for such shipments would have taken the trucks along Lake Mead Drive in Henderson -- technically State Route 146 -- right near the school.

Levenson recently sent 344 letters from parents at the school in Green Valley Ranch, Henderson, asking Energy Secretary Bill Richardson to stop any radioactive shipments.

Unfortunately Richardson does not have the authority to dictate transportation routes. That job is up to the shippers, who fortunately decided not to use the route.

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