Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
10/30/2015
Over 331 congressional districts across 45 states could be affected by transportation routes of commercial spent nuclear fuel should the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada go forward, according to a report commissioned by the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, released last week. California leads the way with 32 potential districts affected, followed by Texas at 29 districts, Florida at 22 districts, Illinois at 18 districts, and Pennsylvania at 17 districts. Nevada has argued that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) obligations extend beyond the actual Yucca Mountain site and into the states that would be affected by transportation routes.
“The report is intended to graphically display the information from DOE’s Yucca Mountain [environmental impact statement] in a way that the people who are going to be affected can see it and understand it as to who is more heavily affected than others,” Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director Bob Halstead told RW Monitor this week. “There are the states that are affected like South Dakota that are only affected because there is like 4 miles of railroad that goes in there. But there are other states like Illinois and Iowa that are highly impacted.”
Nevada has pointed to transportation as an afterthought in the current nuclear waste reform efforts. The state is the lead on 16 contentions relating to transportation issues in DOE’s license application for Yucca while also participating in 24 others brought by separate parties. “So this is all related to the transportation impacts positions we have taken in the NRC licensing proceeding. It is also certainly the case, we hope, that there would be some attention to transportation risk management,” Halstead said. “Under the current setup, if DOE were to start shipping to Yucca Mountain, they are not regulated by the NRC, because DOE takes title to the fuel when it leaves the plant’s gates. There are some really major unresolved safety problems and regulatory issues. And we have been trying to get people to pay attention to this.”
According to the report, “In admitting the transportation contentions submitted by the States of California and Nevada, and other parties, the NRC administrative law judges wrote: ‘Transportation of nuclear waste is a foreseeable consequence of constructing a nuclear waste repository. … [T]here can be no serious dispute that the NRC’s NEPA responsibilities do not end at the boundaries of the proposed repository, but rather extend to the transportation of nuclear waste to the repository.’” The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires all federal agencies to evaluate the impacts of proposed major actions on the human environment, according to the NRC website, but as to who or what is affected, that is left to NRC discretion
Halstead pointed to the Senate’s bipartisan “Nuclear Waste Administration Act of 2015” as an opportunity to address some of these concerns in the nuclear waste program. “We have left the legislative action in the Senate in the hands of Sens. Reid and Heller and in their staffs, but we are hoping that the transportation information that we have developed would lead to a broader discussion of the need to address transportation in the formal process of fixing the nuclear waste program,” Halstead said. “When the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds a hearing on S.854, that would provide an opportunity to address these transportation concerns.”
