Another would include three rail shipments a week for 25 years, or more than 5,000 train loads of radioactive waste cutting across the state from St. Louis to Kansas City. An additional 670 to 4,600 shipments would travel by truck. The military transfers ownserhip of the waste to the DOE before shipment. Overall, the Nevada agency claims between 30 and 38 percent of all shipments to Yucca would travel through the Show Me State. The chosen routes, along with federal complacency, could pose a threat, one opponent said.
DOE discounts such concerns.
Congress has determined that we try to do it now. Radioactive material has been succesfully shipped more than 2,500 times since 1965, according to the energy department. The nuclear industry has a rate of 0.7 accidents per million miles travelled, Halstead said. He has concluded DOE would accumulate about 7.3 million shipment miles along Missouri's rails and roads. Benson echoed that sentiment, explaining no radiation was released in the handful of past accidents involving nuclear material and the casks, or heavily shielded containers, certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to transport nuclear waste.