Planned truck/rail routes for transporting nuclear waste from
Virginia nuclear power plants to Yucca Mountain, Nevada
Source: Environmental Working Group (extract from the
Environmental Impact Statement for the repository at Yucca Mountain)
High level nuclear waste is created by four nuclear power reactors at two sites in Virginia. According to the interpretive exhibits at Surry, each reactor contains 157 fuel assemblies, and each fuel assembly consists of 204 fuel rods loaded with 328 ceramic pellets - so over 16 million pellets are used to generate heat to power the reactor. Each pellet has the energy equivalent to 1800 pounds of coal. When the uranium has decayed so much that nuclear fission is no longer creating sufficient heat, the utility company "refuels" the reactor and replaces the fuel assemblies.
Currently, "spent" fuel assemblies are stored at the Surry and North Anna nuclear power plants. Rods are kept in pools of water to keep the radioactive waste from melting them for 5-10 years, then transferred to "dry casks" for storage outdoors on a concrete pad. Storage at nuclear power plants was expected to be a short-term solution, but a long-term storage facility has not been opened yet. Rather than build new pools to accomdate the waste at North Anna and Surry, Virginia Power obtained the first Federal approval to use dry storage technology.
To move the spent fuel assemblies from the wet pool into dry casks, the casks are first placed inside the pool. The fuel rods are loaded into the casks, the lid of the cask is sealed, water is pumped out, and finally helium is pumped into the cask. Storage in the casks requires far less maintenance than storage in the pools, reducing cost of short-term storage while awaiting completion of the permanent repository. (The US Congress directed that Yucca Mountain in Nye County, Nevada be excavated and prepared as a national repository for storing all high level waste from commercial reactors by 1998, but the Department of Energy missed the deadline.)
Centralizing the waste will centralize the security, environmental, and other risks, including the political headache of determining that one location in the United States will be a permanent "national sacrifice area" dedicated to just one use, maintaining nuclear waste in a safe condition for tens of thousands of years before radioactivity naturally declines to safe levels. There may be an economy of scale that justifies centralization of nuclear waste management, but centralization will require transport of the waste from Virginia to Nevada.
The preferred tranportation process involves placing waste in special casks that are supposed to be able to withstand accidents or terrorist attack, then shipping the casks on rail cars to Yucca Mountain. A railroad line built to the North Anna plant for its construction is still operational, but there is no rail connection to the Surry plant. Casks of nuclear waste from Surry will have to be shipped by truck, or by barge on the James River, to a rail line that will allow transport to Nevada.
