BLUE RIDGE ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE LEAGUE
www.BREDL.org ~ PO Box 88 Glendale Springs, North Carolina 28629 ~ Phone (336) 982-2691 ~ Fax (336) 982-2954 ~ BREDL@skybest.com

May 31, 2002

The Honorable Mike Easley Office of the Governor 116 West Jones Street Raleigh, NC 27603-8001   Dear Governor Easley:

On behalf of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, I write to ask you to reconsider your support for a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The massive number of waste shipments needed to move 2,248 metric tons of irradiated fuel from nuclear power plants in North Carolina would put millions of people at risk from accidents, sabotage, and routine exposures.

The radioactivity in nuclear waste fuel rods is so great that no transport method can prevent radiation from escaping. According to the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, “Shipping containers with enough shielding to completely contain all emissions are too heavy to transport economically.” A fully loaded nuclear waste truck transport may contain 850,000 Curies. The result is that permitted exposure to radiation from nuclear waste shipments, 1000 millirem/hour at the transport cask surface, will cause a predictable amount of death and disease.

The record of highway and railway sabotage incidents reveals a troubling pattern: Terrorist attacks on nuclear waste shipments would be designed to inflict maximum human injury, Electronic warning systems can be defeated by technical countermeasures, Effective attacks using home made explosives to breach nuclear transport casks are possible, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission standards for transport cask safety can be overcome by saboteurs.

Accidents on our roads and rails occur daily. The US Department of Energy predicts a rate of accidents for railroad and truck transports. A fully loaded nuclear waste truck cask can weigh 26 tons, an overweight truck under normal standards. The result: hundreds of nuclear transport accidents will occur if waste shipments to Nevada are permitted. And DOE experience with nuclear waste transport to date is a tiny fraction of the 96,000 shipments that would be needed to transport thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain. Moreover, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposes to weaken the already inadequate requirements for Type B transport containers, the kind used for irradiated fuel.

The Yucca Mountain dump would be the costliest construction project in history at $58 billion. The DOE estimates that the Nuclear Waste Fund, monies collected from electric utility customers, will provide only $28 billion. Taxpayers would pay the remainder.

As you know, the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act sparked a national grassroots opposition to nuclear waste dumping. Our organization was founded in 1984 to defend our mountain home from the federal Crystalline Repository Project. When the US Congress intervened in 1987, it selected Nevada and effectively side-tracked the 12 preferred waste dump sites in the eastern United States. Two of these sites were located in geological formations in North Carolina: the Elk River Massif near Asheville and the Rolesville Pluton north of Raleigh. But the Crystalline Repository Project was never abandoned, and the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management is still funded. If and when the Yucca dump reaches the legal limit of its capacity--77,000 tons--a second repository would be needed for the additional tens of thousands of tons of high level nuclear waste expected to be produced by existing commercial nuclear power reactors. An eastern dump is a real possibility which ought not be overlooked by a state with two eligible nuclear waste sites. The unprecedented, unwilling selection of Nevada should sound alarms in North Carolina. What will be the next federal project forced on a state over and above the objections of its Governor and its entire Congressional delegation?

Governor Easley, we make the following recommendations for the State of North Carolina. These are minimum, prudent and constructive measures which will protect the people of our state and others:

We ask that you take the bold step of reversing your stated position in favor of the Yucca Mountain project. Further, we ask that you implement the recommendations outlined above as soon as possible.

Respectfully,

Louis A. Zeller

Yucca Mountain