Nuclear casks could survive attack, NRC says

WASHINGTON — The containers for carrying radioactive waste to the planned Yucca Mountain dump in Nevada would survive a Sept. 11 style airliner attack, the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Thursday.

NRC Chairman Nils Diaz told a House subcommittee that officials concluded that after running classified tests. The potential danger of transporting nuclear waste across the nation's roads and railways has been a key argument made by opponents of the Yucca Mountain project.

"Our present findings are that a transportation cask that's been certified by the NRC . . . would actually resist the impact of a large aircraft without releasing radioactivity to the public," Diaz said, responding to a question from subcommittee Chairman Rep. Ralph Hall, R-Texas.

"We have even carried them beyond the aircraft crashes, and we feel confident that the present design of this cask is quite resistant to terrorist attack and will provide substantial protection to the American public," he said.

Diaz also said the casks would survive being stuck inside a burning train trapped in a tunnel — as happened in a Baltimore rail tunnel in 2001 — without a significant release of radioactivity.

The director of Nevada's Nuclear Projects Office, Bob Loux, questioned Diaz's assertions in an interview later.

"If the public can't have an opportunity to see casks being tested in all of these testing areas and possibly even tested to destruction so they know where the thresholds are, it doesn't seem to me that any of these tests really improve public confidence," he said.

The Yucca Mountain dump 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas would hold 77,000 tons of highly radioactive spent reactor fuel now held at commercial power plants in 31 states and government waste from its nuclear weapons program. The Department of Energy wants to open the dump in 2010 and intends to submit a license application to the NRC next December.

Nevada is challenging the project in federal court.