A tractor-trailer hauling about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of low-grade uranium overturned as it exited a major U.S. interstate highway, but the crash did not pose a threat to the public, authorities said.
The truck crashed onto its side after the driver lost control on an exit ramp along Interstate 95, said Jason Barbour, Johnston County’s emergency communications director. One of two people in the truck suffered minor injuries, and no other vehicles were involved, he said.
The truck was carrying a radioactive material called packaged fissile, Highway Patrol spokesman Lt. Everett Clendenin said. The powdered uranium was packed in containers that weren’t breached by the accident, he said.
“There’s no threat to the public,” Clendenin said. “It’s a low grade uranium.”
It appears this was nothing but a simple accident. Whether it was driver error, a load “balancing” issue, or whatever, it was an accident. No radioactive material escaped. No harm, no foul. Right?
Accidents happen. We all know that no matter how careful you are, accidents are bound to happen.
Do you have any idea how many truck related accidents occur each year in the United States?
Nationwide, approximately 60,000 tractor-trailer wrecks happen each year on Interstate highways.
How many trucks are currently transporting “low-grade” radioactive material? How many will be transporting radioactive material if Yucca Mountain ever opens for business? The answer is “thousands”.
There will be thousands of nuclear waste truck shipments on our Interstates if Yucca Mountain starts accepting waste from our nation’s nuclear power plants.
An overwhelming majority of the nuclear power plants in the United States are located east of the Mississippi River. The nuclear waste generated by those plants must travel across the entire United States in order to be stored at Yucca Mountain, and this nuclear waste will be far from “low-grade”. It will be top-notch, nothing-but-the-best, high-level nuclear waste and it will be traveling through your backyard!
But, if it doesn’t get there by truck, it will be sent by train.
Nationally, there were 7,300 train accidents per year from 1990-2001 for a total of 88,000 accidents over the 12 year period. Over 23,700 trains derailed and 14,700 trains carrying hazardous waste were involved in accidents, a rate of 1,975 and 1,225 per year respectively. 448 of these accidents involved the release of hazardous material.
You may think these numbers are not too impressive. Over the course of 12 years, 448 accidents involving leaks doesn’t sound like a lot, does it? Nothing to worry about, right? Wrong.
On December 4th in Franklin County, Illinois:
A broken rail is being blamed for a Dec. 4 train derailment that caused three locomotives and nearly two dozen cars from a Union Pacific freight train to leave the tracks in rural Franklin County.
The incident occurred around 2:45 a.m. that day and caused the evacuation of around 100 people in the Mitchell Lake area southeast of Christopher. Three tanker cars overturned and spilled a non-hazardous chemical onto the ground.
…
Residents in the affected area were allowed to return to their homes late in the afternoon Dec. 4 and the track was reopened the following day, although some workers remain at the site.
On December 15th, in Carroll County, Maryland:
No one was injured and there was no hazardous-material spill when a CSX freight train derailed early Friday near Marriottsville.
Carroll County officials issued a voluntary evacuation order Friday afternoon for people living within one mile of the site as CSX crews worked to right a tanker carrying 33,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia that overturned.
…
The evacuation and shelter-in-place orders were lifted shortly before 7 p.m. after the tanker was righted, said Sgt. Bill Rehkopf, a spokesman for the Sykesville Fire Department.
Of course, neither of these trains were carrying radioactive material. If they were carrying high-level nuclear waste, and there had been a “leak”, the report might have read something like this,
Hundreds were killed and thousands were injured when a train carrying high-level nuclear waste derailed early Friday near Las Vegas. County officials issued a mandatory evacuation order Friday afternoon for people within a 5 mile radius of the site as hazardous materials crews worked to seal off the area around the spill. More people were injured in the melee that followed the evacuation order as they panicked and attempted to escape the city. The evacuation order will not be lifted until the year 2056, the year in which the cleanup is scheduled to be completed.
Am I exaggerating? Hardly. It could actually be much worse. According to Radioactive Waste Management Associates, this is a worst-case scenario:
Near a transportation accident, this report estimates acute radiation doses due to inhalation of a passing radioactive cloud to be in the hundreds of rems close to the release location. This is a thousand times what a person receives from background radiation in a year. Thousands of people are likely to be in the downwind path. For example, this study estimated that over 138,000 persons would be affected by a severe rail accident releasing radioactive material in Las Vegas. Persons indoors would also be exposed. If ventilation systems were not shut off, radioactive particulates would settle within hotels and other buildings, contaminating rugs, furniture, beds, and causing a radiation dose to those inside.
Discussions with emergency personnel in Las Vegas and Clark County clearly indicate the accident would overwhelm local response capabilities. Before local emergency responders could accurately assess the problem, the radioactive plume would have already contaminated an extensive area. Radioactive particulates settling on roads and highways are likely to be spread by traffic, possibly contaminating distant locations and extending the area of contamination past that assumed in this study. This may result in the contamination of many more people than was estimated in this report.
Given the high number of people exposed, local responders will not be able to identify, let alone effectively quarantine, contaminated people. Thus, it will be extremely difficult to stop the spread of contamination. Initial decontamination efforts will probably be limited to emergency responders and people in the closest vicinity of the accidents. Decontamination of the affected population in general will be a massive effort.
Evacuation will be difficult at best. Spontaneous evacuation by people not in the contaminated area will probably occur in great numbers, making the targeted evacuations much more difficult to complete. At a minimum, the evacuation of highly contaminated areas would be necessary. For a rail accident, evacuation would have to be in a radius greater than one kilometer; this would represent a large number of people if the accident took place near the Las Vegas Strip.
In the case of an accident in Las Vegas, consideration would have to be given to closing McCarran airport in order to prevent the migration of contaminated persons. Alternately, all passengers would have to be screened for contamination. This would require a huge amount of resources that could be better utilized dealing with the major issues.
The incident would overwhelm the capability of the local medical community. Blood and urine samples of contaminated people should be taken to track the levels of contamination and exposure, but this would be very difficult given the number of contaminated and potentially contaminated individuals. Mental health resources would be overwhelmed as well.
Unless radionuclides, particularly cesium, were removed from surfaces, remaining residents would be exposed for long time periods. Complete decontamination would be prohibitively expensive and would also expose workers; a balance would take place between clean-up costs and long-term radiation exposures. In this report we chose the EPA’s Protective Action Guide as a criteria for decontamination; assuming that a person should not receive more than 5 rems over a 50-year period, including initial inhalation due to the passing cloud. If areas are not decontaminated, we estimate between 6,000 and 41,000 latent cancer fatalities would result from exposure to radiation resulting from the rail accident in Las Vegas, depending on the risk model. If radioactive contaminants were not remediated, there would be continuous direct gamma exposure to remaining residents.
This isn’t unthinkable either. It could happen anywhere along the thousands of miles of railroad tracks used to transport the nuclear waste.
In 2001, the Federal Railroad Administration found 108,000 defects in tracks and signal equipment nationwide. A defect is defined as equipment that does not meet federal standards.
Will it really matter how an accident happens? When it comes to shipments of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, it wont matter at all.
Splitting uranium-235 atoms in a nuclear reactor creates intensely radioactive elements known as fission products, such as cesium, strontium, and plutonium. When spent nuclear fuel is removed from the reactor core, it is about one million times more radioactive than when it was loaded. A typical rail cask of high-level nuclear waste contains more than 200 times the long-lived radiation (cesium and strontium) than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. If unshielded, the average cask of nuclear waste destined for Nevada delivers a lethal dose of radiation in 2 minutes to a person standing 3 feet away.
Today, it was just a shipment of low-grade uranium, tomorrow, who knows.
Knowing this, do you really want these shipments traveling through your hometown?
Do you have any data for how many truckloads of nuclear waste are produced per year? You say it’s thousands, but I’m under the impression that it’s small, maybe one truck per nuclear plant, and your map shows maybe 20 plants in the whole US.
Comment by zandperl on Dec 22nd, 2006 @ 11:25
It will be thousands of truckloads.
As of 1995, there was over 23,614 metric tons of nuclear waste currently being stored on-site at our nation’s nuclear power plants. There are roughly 110 nuclear reactors in the United States that produce approximately 170 pounds of nuclear waste every day they produce power.
Each tractor trailer can carry approximately 1.5 metric tons of this waste, each train car can carry 8.57 metric tons.
If Yucca Mountain opened, it would take over 15,742 truckloads or 2,755 train cars to transport the existing material (as of 1995) to the site.
Now, let’s get back to your question about current production.
As I said before, each reactor creates 170 pounds of nuclear waste every day, so the 110 reactors across the nation produce 8.48 metric tons of waste each day. (1 metric ton = 2,204.62262 pounds).
Over the course of a year it adds up to 3,095 metric tons. This translates into 2,063 truckloads or 361 train cars per year.
So I think using the term “thousands” is more than appropriate.
I hope this answered your question.
Comment by Slobokan on Dec 22nd, 2006 @ 12:58
Thankfully nobody was hurt in this accident, and the packaging worked as designed. For more details on this particular incident, follow this link:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2006/12/truck-carrying-low-grade-uranium.html
As for used nuclear fuel, here are a few data points from an NEI fact sheet on the subject at the following address:
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=2&catid=80
The high-level waste currently produced by all U.S. nuclear power plants as used fuel rods totals about 2000 tons per year. The United States produces a total of about 41 million tons of hazardous waste each year, 8 million tons of which is routinely transported around the country annually. All used nuclear fuel has been managed so that no adverse impacts to human health or the environment has occurred.
The nuclear energy industry has carried out more than 3000 shipments of used nuclear fuel over 1.7 million miles of U.S. highways and railroads since 1964. No nuclear fuel container has ever leaked or cracked in any way. In total, fuel containers were involved in just eight accidents, only four with fuel loaded in the container. The most serious was an overturned truck in 1971. No radiation was released in any of the accidents.
For more information, go to the following link:
http://www.nei.org/index.asp?catnum=1&catid=15
Finally, to get a good idea of just how the containers carrying used nuclear fuel are tested, we’ve uploaded a number of videos to Google Video.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=used+nuclear+fuel+container+testing
If you have any other questions, I’m happy to answer, or to direct you to a proper source.
Comment by Eric McErlain on Dec 22nd, 2006 @ 14:29
Not sure if you know this, but this story very briefly broke on CNN last night…Anderson Cooper Show (360) between the hours of 10-11 with a small singular picture that looked as if it had been taken with a cell phone, then the story was buried.
It seems that Homeland Security and one Officer of the North Carolina State Highway Patrol, Lt. Mark Dalton (who is the liason between them and DHS) decided to throw up what is called and EXCLUSIONARY ZONE…in short, ALL PRESS WAS KEPT AWAY FROM THIS SUPPOSED MINOR ACCIDENT.
Secondly, this was NOT what the industry wants us to think it was. The container in question was from a reactor in Kurihama, Japan. The materials were from spent fuel, being returned to Global Nuclear Fuel for REPROCESSING. This accident could have been BIBLICAL in proportion! You can find more on my Washington Scandal Blog linked above.
Porgie Tirebiter
Comment by Porgie Tirebiter on Dec 22nd, 2006 @ 20:32
Now, if that accident happened to affect the water table or Colorado River…
Comment by Marten on Dec 23rd, 2006 @ 00:54