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.

Roll On, Columbus

The speakers are lined up, the hotel is under contract, and the minivans are reserved - all of which makes it official: the committee will meet in Columbus, Ohio, on November 27-29. The meeting will kick off on Tuesday, November 27, with a committee business session in the afternoon. On Wednesday the 28^th, committee members will hear from several DOE programs that either are or will be shipping radioactive materials through the region, including the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management. Attendees will also hear about past and ongoing efforts to develop high-capacity shipping casks for spent nuclear fuel. In addition, a representative of Dairyland Power Cooperative will share the company's experiences with the shipment by rail of a reactor vessel from the La Crosse, Wis., nuclear plant that is undergoing decommissioning.

On Thursday, November 29, the committee and other attendees will have an opportunity to tour the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, Ohio. The site is currently the home of 20,000 cylinders full of depleted uranium hexafluoride, which DOE will soon start converting to a more stable compound for transport to disposal facilities in the West. Starting in 2008, shipments of the converted material from Portsmouth and a similar facility in Paducah, Kentucky, will pass through the Midwest on a weekly basis for 18 to 25 years. (That isn't a typo - it really will take 18 to 25 years.) Space on the tour is limited to 25 people. The staff has reserved seats for all committee members. If you do not plan to attend the meeting or if you will not participate in the tour, please call or e-mail Lisa at ljanairo@csg.org as soon as possible so that we can make your seat available to another meeting attendee. CSG Midwest will follow-up with all those registrants that indicate a desire to attend the tour. The deadline for registering for the meeting and reserving a room at the hotel is November 5. Sarah will send reimbursement forms to all registered committee members two weeks before the meeting. For more information on the meeting, please contact Lisa or Sarah.

Click here for the meeting registration website.

Click here for The Columbus - A Renaissance Hotel website.

Click here for the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant website.

Yucca Mountain High

Newer members of the committee will have an opportunity to tour Yucca Mountain in Nevada on Monday, June 9, 2008. CSG will invite all new legislative appointees to tour the site Congress designated for development as a national repository for commercial spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste. The committee co-chairs will also attend, and invitations will be issued to all gubernatorial appointees who have joined the committee in the last two years. To further the committee's goal of building a strong tie with the CSG Midwestern Legislative Conference (MLC), the committee staff will invite several members of the MLC's Energy Committee to attend.

As with the first State Government Officials' Tour of Yucca Mountain, held in 2005, the event will begin with a briefing session on the evening of June 8. The choice of a weekend travel date came at the request of several new legislative members, who expressed their desire to avoid mid-week dates due to legislative session schedules. During the June 8 briefing, state officials will learn about the status of the Yucca Mountain repository and about the role of CSG's Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee in helping to develop the transportation system. The event will conclude with a debriefing over dinner following the tour. Invitations for the event will be sent in December. For more information on the tour, please contact Lisa.

It's Judgment Day in Santa Fe

Last week the Western Governors' Association WIPP Transportation Technical Advisory Group and the Western Interstate Energy Board High-Level Radioactive Waste Committee held their fall meetings in Santa Fe, NM. Sarah attended both meetings on behalf of the committee. Both meetings included the regular round-up of DOE happenings, but discussion brought out some interesting developments:

• There was a lot of discussion about the 180(c) Federal Register notice (available here), which DOE is soliciting comments on until October 22nd. DOE said that after comments are received, the pilot 180(c) program would proceed, and then DOE will issue another draft notice based on lessons learned from the pilot. However, DOE said that the pilot will not happen until FY09 at the earliest.
• DOE announced that they are revising the start and finish dates for the Nevada rail line. The current plans have construction beginning in 2009, with completion in 2014. DOE announced that those dates would likely be pushed back a bit. DOE will also know within the next year if the rest of the current schedule, which has Yucca Mountain opening in 2017, will slip.
• In response to the recommendations from the 2005 NAS study on the safety of spent fuel transportation, the NRC said that they will not do a follow-up security study at this time. Click here to see the committee's May 2006 letter to the NRC on this subject. Based on the current Yucca Mountain timeline and the possibility for changes in the transportation landscape, the NRC said it was not prudent to do the study right now. They will revisit the issue in the future. DOE, however, said that they want to address the issue of societal risk right away, as recommended by the NAS study. Two possible ways to do so are through the TEC Working Group, either as a separate Societal Risk Topic Group, or as part of an existing Topic Group. Either way, the Midwestern states will be active participants.
• As reported in the last edition of the newsletter (available here), DOE had recently decided to drop spent fuel shipments from the Prospective Shipment Report because, they say, of the presence of safeguards information. Using the rationale Lisa had drafted (available here), Sarah was able to get confirmation from the NRC that the information on the PSR is not safeguards information, and therefore there is no reason spent fuel shipments cannot be listed on it. Lisa and Sarah will work with DOE and the other regions to make sure this problem gets rectified.
• DOE announced that there is still no disposition site for the uranium oxide shipments from Portsmouth and Paducah. Once that decision is made, the transportation plan, which is currently being drafted, will be sent for review by the states. That campaign is set to start in 2008 (see the first story above for further information).

Sarah will give a complete report on the two meetings during the Columbus committee meeting. In the meantime, if you have questions, please contact her at swochos@csg.org or 630-925-1922.

Thanks for reading! Look for the next issue in two weeks!

Sincerely,
Lisa Janairo and Sarah Wochos
Committee Staff