Welcome to the CSG Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee Update. Below are links and summaries of several important happenings from the last few weeks. Please don't hesitate to contact Lisa (920/458-5910) or Sarah (630/925-1922) with any questions or concerns about any of these issues.

Northwest Compact Makes EnergySolutions an Offer it Can't Refuse

Or maybe it can. On May 8, the eight states in the Northwest Interstate Compact on Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management gave a unanimous thumbs-down to EnergySolutions' proposal to import 20,000 tons of low-level radioactive waste from Italian reactors for treatment and disposal in the United States (see the March 18 newsletter for more information). Technically, the compact's action was to clarify that the contract between the compact and EnergySolutions does not permit the burial of foreign waste at the company's disposal facility in Clive, Utah. EnergySolutions previously imported waste from countries such as Canada and France, but the compact's actions last week will effectively stop this practice unless the company and the compact can work out "an arrangement" to accept foreign waste.

Anticipating the compact's action, EnergySolutions filed a lawsuit three days before the compact's meeting, seeking clarification that the compact has no authority to stop the import of foreign waste. Armed with this big stick, the company offered a small carrot to the compact, promising to voluntarily limit the amount of space earmarked for foreign waste to just five percent of the total capacity at the Clive facility.

In what may be a related development, House bill H.R. 5632, which would ban imports like the one proposed, picked up four new co-sponsors last week, bringing the total to seven.

Read the coverage in the Salt Lake Tribune:
Lawsuit
Compact

NRC Documents:
License application
Federal Register notice
Fact sheet

Final Report on Reporting

After 15 months of writing, rewriting, negotiating, and renegotiating, the state regional groups and DOE-EM's Office of Packaging and Transportation signed off on a proposal to improve the process of notifying and reporting to the states and the regions regarding all kinds of shipment-related "happenings" that take place during transit. Actually, "happenings" is the one term that was not used in the document, but the working group did wrestle with the definitions of terms such as "event," "accident," "incident," and "emergency."

In a nutshell, the DOE shipping sites will notify the affected states through their 24-hour emergency points of contact within one hour of learning that something significant has happened with a shipment. Events that would trigger a call to the 24-hour number would include a fatality, security breach, or road closure as the result of an accident. For less clear-cut situations, the sites will follow this rule of thumb: "When in doubt, notify." The state regional groups will continue to receive information on all events within one week of their occurrence. We'll also continue to get updates on all shipment-related happenings at the region's semi-annual meetings.

Kicked off in January 2007, the effort to develop the new procedures demonstrated well the type of accomplishment that can come from cooperation between the regions and DOE. According to Ella McNeil, who led the activity for EM, several of the DOE sites already have had positive things to say about the end result. We're still waiting for the word from the states, but we're counting on that being positive, too.

To read the new procedures, click here.

It's 10 O'Clock: Do You Know Where Your Shipments Are?

If you're a TRANSCOM user, you do. TRANSCOM is DOE's satellite-based tracking system for keeping tabs on the department's shipments that are on the road (or rails). Over the years, TRANSCOM has morphed from a slow-as-molasses, limited-access, dial-up system housed in Tennessee to a much more powerful, web-based system with unlimited users, managed by DOE's Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico. Improvements to the system have come largely as a result of feedback from the system's many users, including DOE shipping programs, universities, and the states.

On April 25, DOE distributed the meeting minutes and summary of user feedback from the most recent TRANSCOM Users Group Meeting, held on March 4 in Albuquerque. Because of the difficulty of obtaining permission for state personnel to travel to the Users Group meetings, the Midwest had suggested DOE consider holding conference calls as an alternative or a supplement to the annual meetings. In response to the suggestion, the group decided to continue to hold annual meetings but also to schedule a conference call every six months so as to increase participation. The first such call will take place in September 2008. All TRANSCOM users are invited to attend meetings and participate in the conference calls. The Midwestern committee's official representative on the Users Group is Carol O'Claire from the Ohio Emergency Management Agency.

To view the meeting follow-up materials, click below:
Meeting minutes
Summary of state feedback
Presentation on status of TRANSCOM

To view the April 2008 TRANSCOM newsletter, which lists training dates, click here.

Thanks for reading! Look for our next update in your inbox in two weeks.

Sincerely,
Lisa Janairo and Sarah Wochos
Committee Staff