Radioactive Waste 217 - U.S. District Court OKs Transportation Of Toxic Liquid Radioactive Waste From Canada To U.S. For Reprocessingc
Last August, I wrote a post about plans by the U.S. Department of Energy to ship nuclear waste by truck twelve hundred miles from Canada's Chalk River Laboratory near Ottawa to Savannah River in Georgia. The U.S. supplies the Chalk River Laboratory with highly enriched weapons grade uranium which is used as target material in the production of medical isotopes. The waste is highly liquid uranyl nitrate left over from the process that produces the medical isotopes.
Highly Enriched Uranyl Nitrate Liquid or HEUNL contains many different radioactive isotopes including as cesium, niobium, zirconium, rhodium, rubidium, iodine, xenon, tellurium, barium, lanthanum, cerium, strontium, praseodymium, neodymium, europium, neptunium and plutonium. Special transportation canisters have been developed for the transport of HEUNL which is more complex and dangerous that the transportation of solid HEU waste. The movement of six thousand gallons of the radioactive toxic liquid waste will require one hundred and fifty tanker trunks to carry the waste over public roads for at the rate of one or more a week. At Savannah River Nuclear Reservation, the waste is to be reprocessed to recover radioactive compounds that can be used to make more reactor fuel.
Due to strong opposition from environmental groups, the movement of the waste had been stalled pending the outcome of a lawsuit brought the Sierra Club, Beyond Nuclear and other groups. The environmental groups were calling for a complete environmental impact statement (EIS) for the transportation of the waste. A U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. has just ruled that there has been enough DoE review and that another EIS is not necessary. The Court said that the transportation of the waste can now proceed.
While it is true that nuclear materials have been transported around the U.S. before on trucks, the crucial difference here is that the previous shipments of radioactive waste have consisted of solid materials. If there should be an accident that caused solid waste materials to enter a body of water along the transportation route, the materials would remain a solid form and there would be little risk of serious contamination even if the lost material were not recovered.
Transporting liquid wastes by truck pose an entirely new level of risk. If there was an accident and liquid nuclear waste entered a body of water, it would disperse into the water and could never be recovered. Because it is a liquid, a much smaller quantity would result in a much greater threat of contamination. It has been estimated that as little as a few ounces of high-level nuclear waste would be sufficient to contaminate a body of water so much that it would render it useless as a source of drinking water for people nearby. The researchers used the Georgetown reservoir for their study.
Despite what the court just said, environmental activists are still demanding that a more thorough environmental review be conducted of the dangers of transporting six thousand gallons of highly radioactive toxic waste over public roads and over many bodies of water that are crucial for the supply of drinking water to many cities and towns along the proposed route.
Source: Beyond Nuclear
