A "game" of radioactive Russian roulette on the roads, rails, and waterways, anyone?! How about unprecedented thousands of rolls of those dice?!
H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017, poised for a full U.S. House floor vote by the end of July, could launch these high-risks through most states, many major cities, and most congressional districts!
Thank you to the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects for its ongoing leadership in documenting and educating the country on the risks of irradiated nuclear fuel transportation. (When it comes to irradiated nuclear fuel transportation, we ALL live in Nevada!)
Here are the latest maps by the State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, regarding road and rail routes for shipping highly radioactive waste from reactor sites to Yucca Mountain, Nevada:
Note that, although the maps depict Yucca-bound waste shipments, there is a lot of overlap of routing, regarding centralized interim storage facilities targeted at west Texas (Waste Control Specialists, LLC, Andrews County) and/or southeast New Mexico (Eddy-Lea [Counties] Energy Alliance).
In addition to the road and rail routes shown above, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has also identified numerous potential surface water barging routes across the U.S., from the Great Lakes, to rivers, to sea coasts, in its 2002 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the proposed Yucca dump.
Irradiated nuclear fuel shipments can also be considered "Mobile X-Ray Machines That Can't Be Turned Off" (Loren Olson, sister of Mary Olson, NIRS S.E. office director, coined this phrase two decades ago). This is because of a "region of influence" due to hazardous gamma radiation and neutron radiation emitted by the irradiated nuclear fuel, 800 feet (a half-mile) in radius, extending in all directions from the cask. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) permissive regulations allow for 10 millirem per hour dose rates (equivalent to one to two chest X-rays per hour), in terms of penetrating gamma radiation, at a distance of 6 feet (2 meters) away from the outer surface of the shipping cask. At the surface itself, dose rates of 200 millirem per hour (equivalent to 20 to 40 chest X-rays per hour) are allowed. NRC's lax regulations save the nuclear power industry money, in terms of the radiation shielding required on shipping casks. But the price tag for such industry-cost savings comes at the expense of worker and public health.