Holtec nuclear storage proposal not as dangerous as some think

THE ALBUQUERQUE Journal recently published a letter from an Odessa, Texas, resident alarmed about the risk of transporting spent fuel for the proposed high-level waste interim storage facility to be built between Carlsbad and Hobbs.

In January 2014, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission published a NUREG-2125, “Spent Fuel Transportation Risk Assessment,” a definitive study summarizing the results of more than 40 years of experiments and analysis of routine exposure and accident risks associated with the transportation of spent fuel of the type to be stored in the proposed facility. This analysis concluded the following: “If there were an accident during a spent fuel shipment, there is only about one-in-a-billion chance that the accident would result in a release of radioactive material. … None of the fire accidents investigated in this study resulted in a release of radioactive material. … The risk of gamma shielding loss from a fire is negligible. … The collective dose risks from routine transportation are very small. These doses are approximately four to five orders of magnitude less than the collective background radiation dose (one ten thousandth to one one hundred thousandth of radiation received from natural sources).”

In short, transportation of spent fuel in accordance with current U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations is a remarkably safe activity and not a cause for concern. I encourage anyone interested in this issue to check out NUREG-2125 — available from www. nrc.gov — and get the facts.