PFS site - but no transport? Spent-fuel trucks may be too big for Skull Valley road

"Humongous" slow-moving trucks weighing 225 tons would haul casks of highly radioactive fuel, hogging the narrow Skull Valley road in Tooele County, if the Private Fuel Storage facility is built.

That was the word from Denise Chancellor, assistant Utah attorney general, Wednesday while briefing the Legislature's Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment Interim Committee.

Legislators viewed schematics prepared by the Utah Department of Transportation, showing the size of the trucks, each of which would haul a load of 10 metric tons from a rail unloading facility near I-80 to the PFS plant on the Goshute Indian Reservation in Skull Valley, 26 miles away.

Most of the weight would consist of the heavy protective transportation cask housing spent fuel rods.

Originally, PFS planned to build a spur rail line from the Union Pacific railroad track to its site. But Congress moved to block that by designating the Cedar Mountain Wilderness Area, effectively barring a rail-hauling option. So PFS would have to haul the waste by truck from the railroad to the storage site.

One truck "will take up basically all of the road," she said.

The schematic showed a truck straddling the road's center line to avoid driving at the edge of the pavement.

The route, U-196, is in "sad shape," Chancellor added. Varying from 20 to 22 feet across, often without a shoulder, it is a main thoroughfare to Dugway Proving Ground. It is also an escape route that would be used if an accident happened at the Army's chemical weapons incinerator, located near Stockton, Tooele County.

PFS is licensed to haul casks that weigh 10 metric tons. The trucks would have up to 100 tires, and the vehicles are only a few inches shorter than an overpass they would need to clear.

It's unprecedented for so much of the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, up to 40,000 tons, to be stored in one place, she said.

Should PFS become a reality, nuclear waste will be shipped by rail through Salt Lake City en route to Tooele County, she said. About 697,000 Utahns live within five miles of the route.

The casks would be unloaded and placed on trucks at an intermodal transfer facility to be built about where the frontage road meets I-80.