stuck on the road - with a 90,000-pound nuclear waste cask

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/walters09202008.html


An 18-Wheeler and a Nuclear Cask ...
Hung Up on Route 36


Co-Editor’s note: California’s Route 36 connects Highway 101 south of Fortuna with Interstate 5 at Red Bluff, 140 miles to the east. It’s a narrow, endlessly twisting, two-lane, mostly mountain road running through the Yolla Bollies, sparsely populated, beautiful and very difficult terrain. I’ve driven over it quite a few times in various cars and three-quarter or one ton trucks and you really have to be on your toes. The notion of an 18-wheeler, 108 feet long, carrying an empty nuclear waste cask, negotiating those tight, blind curves, most of them without guard rails, seems insane. It just happened. The rig got official clearance. It also got stuck. AC.
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Just before noon on the Friday before Labor Day weekend, a truck carrying an empty 90,000-pound nuclear waste cask to the Humboldt Bay Power Plant came to a slow halt on a sharp curve on State Route 36. It happened near Buck Mountain on a shoulderless, narrow, steep section of road flanked by a rising wall of rock on one side and a 75-foot chasm on the other. The big rig — 108 feet and four inches long — blocked the entire roadway, with one axle suspended in air above the chasm. And it wasn't until more than 24 hours later, after a tricky operation involving more big rigs and a crane, that the blockage was cleared. The stuck truck disrupted the plans of some travelers headed for Ruth Lake to get a jump on the weekend. It also provoked ready suspicion in some of the people who live along that remote, twisty highway, for whom all it took was even a whiff of a report that this truck had something to do with something nuclear for them to want to simultaneously rush to the scene in morbid curiosity and flee the region in fear.

-snip-

That's true, says spokesperson Jana Morris with Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns Humboldt Bay Power Plant. Once at Humboldt Bay, the cask will be filled with spent nuclear fuel assemblies, which have resided in pools at the site for decades; the nuclear power plant was shut down in 1976. Then it will be sealed and buried along with four other casks in an underground storage tank on site at the plant.

“We're storing it until the Department of Energy can take it to a site,” Morris said. So far, the only site the DOE has seriously considered is at Yucca Mountain in Nevada — and the horizon for that facility's opening date keeps receding.

-snip-

“And the driver selected the route,” East said.

One can imagine the poor guy — identified by the California Highway Patrol as Kenneth Soest of Minnesota — studying the map, calculating angles versus squiggles, and coming up with an obvious speedy shot over I-80 from Nevada to I-5, then up to Red Bluff and the closest jog west to Humboldt County and the bay — State Route 36. On the map, it doesn't really look much worse than the other possibilities. But, said East, the driver falsified some information. He reported the wrong spacing between the axles on the rig's trailer — something that could affect the truck's turning radius, East said. “And, the load description on the permit was given as a milling machine, when the actual load was an empty, new, nuclear cask,” she said. Sgt. David Mickelson, supervisor of the CHP's northern division commercial unit, said the truck's driver also had not secured the load properly. “He did not have the required chains for the weight of the load,” said Mickelson by phone on Tuesday. The load didn't come off — but had the truck tipped over, it might have, he said.

-snip-

With the delivery of last week's cask, the new PG&E facility now has four of its five casks on site. The other three came up highway 101, said PG&E spokesperson Morris. As for the last one, a very strict order has gone out that whoever drives the thing here cannot take Route 36, she added.

-snip-

“I think it proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the hauling of radioactive material is the wrong thing to do,” Welch said by phone last week. “It's unsafe. Thank God it wasn't full and didn't go over an embankment or something.”
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oy

[DS1]

1. All the panic in this article, and it was about as radioactive as your typical house cat

:eyes:

[seemslikeadream]

2. I think the point was it could have been?

way more?

[DS1]

3. And yet, amazingly, it wasn't

[seemslikeadream]

7. not this time or this place

[ensho]

5. people didn't know if it was full of waste or empty - why the sarcasm?

just because you can't see Radiation doesn't mean its not there

[DS1]

8. My radiation goes to eleven

[cherokeeprogressive]

9. From the article: "an empty 90,000-pound nuclear waste cask". n/t

[izquierdista]

4. I keep telling you....

Build the nuke plants UNDERGROUND. Site them in locations with stable geology, far, far, down. Would Chernobyl been a problem if it was 1000 ft. down? No. In case of problem, just cut the cord and backfill the access shafts. If anything was learned from the years of underground nuke testing, it is that half a mile of overburden solves all nuclear waste problems.

[ensho]

6. doesn't it depend on what the "overburden" is made of?

nt

[izquierdista]

12. Yes

That's why you have a geologist in on the planning.

[Wilber_Stool]

10. Chernobyl didn't have a

containment vessel. If it had, The problem would have been localized.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

11. Much Ado About Absolutely Nothing. Alarmism For No Reason. The Damn Thing Was Empty.

What a waste of reading time. No nuclear safety issue whatsoever nor any other issue that would be of interest to very many. The notion that it "could've been full" is nothing but ignorant malarkey. It wasn't full. It was empty. It was completely harmless. Had it been full, it would be a huge stretch to claim that the same route would've been taken and the same circumstances would've occurred. Such a claim would be beyond foolish.

Totally irrelevant story as it relates to nuclear safety.

[spoony]

13. Video of such casks being tested in high speed crashes

http://www.archive.org/details/nuccasktest1

So little effort is necessary to remedy the ignorance that causes radiophobia.