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Transportation - a 50 year Safety Record
Transporting spent nuclear fuel is not as dangerous as the trucks that carry chlorine and gasoline every day on our roads and rails.
Every year about 10 people died as a result of a car accident with a gasoline truck. (2000 study by Argonne National Lab).
To date over 3000 casks carrying spent nuclear fuel have traveled over 1.6 million miles without out incident.
The spent fuel is most commonly shipped as a solid ceramic pellet about the size of a pencil eraser, secured inside an assembly of strong metal tubes, inside a concrete cask lined with lead and steel.
There will 3-5 casks on a train rail car, and about 190 – 317 casks will be shipped per year. Annual truck shipments could range from 53 to 89 per year, with one cask per truck.
Nevada can designate the highway and rail routes used for the shipment of spent fuel, and the DOE is proposing a new rail line through rural Nevada that would bypass Reno and Las Vegas. This rail line would also be very helpful to economic development in rural Nevada, especially for the mining industry.
The risk for radiation exposure during transportation is extremely low.
A person standing 100 feet from a vehicle that is carrying nuclear waste and moving 15 miles per hour, would receive about 0.0004 millirem of radiation. A person flying roundtrip from LA to NYC receives about 2.5 millirem, or 12,500 times more radiation.
More than 80 percent of the radiation we are exposed to comes from natural sources such as sunlight, soil, and rocks. Americans receive on average about 360 millirem or radiation each year. |