Coming Soon to a Highway Near You -
Many, Many Containers of Radioactive Waste!

One of the concerns with building a so-called "low-level" radioactive waste (LLRW) dump in our state that often gets ignored is, how will the waste get from locations all over the country to a site in west Texas? The answer is, unfortunately, along the same freeways we drive on - through major Texas cities, suburbs, and rural areas, near large portions of the state's population.
Why is that unfortunate? Consider the implications of a traffic accident involving a shipment of radioactive waste: If a container breaks open and releases its radioactive cargo, it will expose any number of people to radiation. This "release" can be a spill and/or combustion in a fire and dispersion through the air. Radiation exposure causes everything from increased chances of developing cancer to acute radiation syndrome (as at Hiroshima), which kills the victim within days or weeks.
The effect of a population receiving a specific radiation dose in an accident is measured in estimated latent cancer deaths. Put in terms from the headlines we read these days, the purpose of a so-called "dirty bomb" is just that - to expose its targets to the potential lethal effects of radiation exposure.

Assessing the Likelihood of Accidents

Several years ago, when the plan was to put the LLRW "disposal" facility at Sierra Blanca, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority prepared a Transportation Risk Assessment. (The Texas Legislature later abolished the Authority and most of its responsibilities.) This risk assessment attempted to predict the likelihood of accidents involving transported radioactive waste and the potential extent of damage and threat to public health and the environment.
An independent consulting firm, Radioactive Waste Management Associates (RWMA), evaluated this risk assessment and found it lacking. Despite the strong recommendation by RWMA in the mid-1990s that the transportation risk assessment be redone, this never happened.

Problems with the Assessment

There were a number of areas where the consultants concluded the risks of transporting radioactive waste to a dump was underestimated: the number of people likely to be affected, the likelihood of transportation accidents, the potential severity of a major accident, and the number of shipments to the proposed facility. All of these concerns are still valid today.
In order to estimate how many people would be affected by trucking radioactive materials through Texas, the Authority needed to estimate population density nearby. However, the method chosen to do so was clearly flawed. The population density was calculated by dividing the total population of towns or counties by the total land area - thus assuming that people are spread evenly throughout an area. Yet almost anyone, can tell that major roadways have more people located nearby (whether living, working, or even on the road) than other streets, much less small country roads.

Trucks are Trucks

Contrary to industry mythology, transportation accidents involving trucks carrying radioactive materials occur regularly, for a variety of reasons. These are the same reasons that other heavy trucks have accidents (fatigue, weather, animals, drinking, etc.) In other words, all trucks have the same standard, estimated accident rate - an accident about every 150,000 miles traveled. In the U.S., in the period from 1971 to 1994, there were 1485 accidents involving radioactive materials; 149 packages released their radioactive contents.
And Texas does not have a good truck driving record - in fact, in 1993, was number one in the U.S. in total number of large trucks involved in fatal crashes. In addition, human error or poorly designed packaging and handling may also result in accidental release of radioactivity during transport.

No Wreck, So A-OK?

Not quite. There will be radioactivity escaping from some of those trucks even without an accident. All low-level waste containers emit radioactivity, even the heavily shielded shipments of highly radioactive nuclear reactor components. The maximum allowable radiation on the surface of a container is 200 millirems, an amount equal to 10 X-rays, per hour. So even if no accidents happen, the shipments expose everyone along the transportation route to radiation. Assuming the regulations are followed, the amount of radiation exposure from each truck would be small, but the effect of radiation (the total number of latent cancers) is a function of the total exposure. Why do you think the hygienist always leaves the room when you get your teeth X-rayed?

Where Are Accidents Likely to Occur?

The Disposal Authority used some averages of severity calculated by Sandia National Laboratories with a method developed in 1976 (and never updated). RWMA questions some of the assumptions made in that method, most especially the assumption that the extreme accidents would occur in rural areas, while minor accidents would occur in urban areas. Their study of extremely severe accidents (in Nevada) analyzed by the National Transportation Safety Board, showed that almost all such accidents occur in cities and suburbs, not rural areas.

Lots and Lots of Waste

The proposed LLRW facility that the Authority was doing a transportation risk assessment for was one that was to receive only radioactive waste from the Compact states (the Compact was an agreement between Texas, Vermont, and Maine to "dispose of" the three states' LLRW in Texas - Maine has since dropped out of the Compact). Although there were problems with the estimates of the amount of waste (and thus the number of shipments) that would come to Sierra Blanca, current law makes those estimates irrelevant.
Texas is no longer to be home to just compact waste, generated mostly by nuclear power plants here and in Vermont. Now the facility would have a second dump for "federal waste" from nuclear weapons facilities anywhere in the country. HB 1567 would allow 162 million cubic feet of radioactive waste to be delivered to the federal dump alone. This equates to 270,000 truckloads, about a tenth of which would be the more concentrated Classes B and C waste! Add to that the waste from Texas and Vermont (and potentially added Compact states as well) and you are talking about enormous numbers of shipments of dangerous materials flowing across our state for years to come.

Less is Not Necessarily Better

Since 1980 the volume of radioactive waste shipped to management and "disposal" facilities in the U.S. has decreased significantly. But this is due, in large part, to waste being super-compacted, resulting in smaller volumes of more highly radioactive material. HB 1567 establishes practically no limits on the amount of radioactivity in the waste going to the dump. Naturally enough, as the total radioactivity in waste shipments increases, so do the doses from normal (accident-free) transportation and the risks associated with potential accidents.

Scary Stories

Consider a few examples of the kind of things that can go wrong in transporting radioactive material: In downtown San Antonio in 1994, a truck carrying radioactive waste fell on its side on an I-10 freeway ramp near the Alamodome, spilling some radioactive waste onto the highway. In 1988, a shielded container (called "type B" and designed to withstand certain test conditions) containing 17-curie iridium-192 fell out of a pick-up and was run over by a car outside Houston. The thimble-sized material was released, and by the time it was found several hours later (with a Geiger counter), it had exposed many people to levels of radiation equivalent to three X-rays per second. In 2001, a 22-ton shipment of low-level radioactive waste, headed for Waste Control Specialists' processing site in Andrews County, was lost for nearly a month when it reached Texas. The truck was finally found on a ranch near the Oklahoma border, where a disgruntled employee had abandoned the truck and its cargo.

For information about helping fight the establishment of a so-called "disposal" site for low-level radioactive waste in Texas, contact Margot Clarke, Outreach Coordinator for the Lone Star Chapter, at the Sierra Club State Conservation Office in Austin at 512-477-1729 or email her at margot.clarke@sierraclub.org.

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