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“WE’RE HERE to
warn people that a shipment of highly radioactive waste will be moving
through Moberly by train,” Kamps told his listeners. “This could be the
first of tens of thousands of shipments.” The rally was small, but
effective. Two TV crews and some reporters showed up and concern was duly
spread. “If this spills in town, will they come clean it up?” asked one
worried mother. |
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With the Bush administration committed to reviving the nation’s
nuclear industry, people in Moberly and all across the country will be
getting a crash course in nuclear safety—a hot-button issue from the ’70s
whose time is coming again. There’s plenty to be said in favor of nuclear
energy: it’s often cheaper than oil, cleaner than coal and it’s arguably
safer than it used to be. “If you want to do something about carbon
dioxide emissions,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in March, “then you
ought to build nuclear power plants.” Linking nukes to global warming was
a shrewd bit of spin calculated to split the opposition, and it may work.
Most nationals polls show a slow rise in public support for nuclear power
as concern for global warming has grown.
But if the Bush administration intends to push ahead with nukes it must
solve an intractable problem—finding a safe way to store thousands of tons
of highly radioactive spent fuel from the nation’s power reactors. There
are 40,000 metric tons of depleted uranium fuel immersed in storage pools
or encased in aboveground casks in 34 states, and the industry is adding
substantially to that total every year. (There are 103 nuclear plants in
operation, and they provide 20 percent of the nation’s electricity.) Since
the mid-’80s the Feds have been preparing to stash all that waste in a
tunnel under Yucca Mountain, Nev. The Yucca Mountain plan has been tied up
with lawsuits and environmental-impact studies for years, and critics say
important environmental questions still haven’t been answered. But the
Energy Department, which is responsible for finding a solution to the
nation’s nuclear-waste problem, says Secretary Spencer Abraham will make a
final decision on the facility by the end of this year. Abraham is
expected to say yes.
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July 20 —
Click to see how nuclear transport casks are
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Ground zero for the looming confrontation is a dilapidated nuclear
storage facility in West Valley, N.Y., 35 miles south of Buffalo. With
mounting concern over safety issues and protests, the shipment is being
planned like a military operation. The train will consist of seven cars,
two of which will be flatcars laden with white, dumbbell-shaped
containers that are fire-and crash-resistant. Known as casks, these
containers will house the radioactive cargo—125 bundles of metal rods
filled with uranium pellets. A DOE emergency team will ride in a
passenger car at the rear, accompanied by an armed security guard. In
Pennsylvania, state police will shadow the train. In New York, local
police will check highway crossings and monitor the track ahead. DOE
officials will follow the train’s progress by satellite. John
Chamberlain, a spokesman for the West Valley facility, said
law-enforcement officials will be tracking the train with security and
emergency personnel “at the ready.” From New York, the train will run
through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas,
Nebraska and Wyoming en route to a vast DOE reservation in southeastern
Idaho. .gif)
 Newsweek On Air
Nuclear Energy: On
Track?
Hoping to keep protest groups
at least somewhat off balance, DOE officials are keeping the train’s
departure date secret. They have been planning the shipment for more
than a year and Chamberlain confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the FBI has been
asked to “screen” for protests by antinuclear groups. If a protest does
occur, Chamberlain said, “the main thing is to ensure the safety of the
shipment. If you find out there will be a protest 500 miles ahead, you
park the train. If something happens right in front of you, obviously
you’d have to stop.” |
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Newsweek.MSNBC.com |
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Activists all along the route are mobilizing to meet the train,
and the potential for disruption is real. In July, Kamps and others ran
a civil-disobedience seminar in Fort Wayne, Ind., that included training
in how to form a human chain. Participants watched a slide show of an
anti-nuke protest in Germany that led to successful attempts to block a
train. Some German protesters carried off sections of rail and
undermined the tracks by tunneling. Others chained themselves to the
tracks, and some glued themselves to the tracks. “In Germany a group of
six people held up a train for 18 hours,” Kamps said.
The train’s starting point, known as the Western New York
Nuclear Service Center, is a dilapidated monument to the failure of U.S.
nuclear policy and an environmental mess. Built to reprocess spent fuel
from commercial power reactors, the plant shut down in 1972 and never
reopened. Nowadays, hazardous waste is stored in a huge warehouse and
under tarpaulins in the surrounding fields. Until May the 125 reactor
fuel assemblies were stored in a slowly deteriorating indoor pool lined
with brown scum and filled with lethally radioactive water.
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“West Valley is a testament to what happens when you don’t plan
from the outset,” says Richard Lester, a nuclear engineer at MIT.
“People really didn’t think about nuclear waste.” They are now—and when
the train finally pulls out of West Valley, the future direction of
America’s energy policy will be onboard.
© 2001 Newsweek,
Inc.
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A Nuke Train
Gets Ready to Roll
