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Trucks bearing high-level radioactive nuclear waste have been crossing Virginia over the past two years en route to a special testing facility in Idaho. The trucks are from Virginia Power’s nuclear power plants near Richmond.
Through an agreement with the Department of Energy, Virginia Power has been shipping irradiated nuclear fuel assemblies to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratories for a dry cask demonstration program.
A cask is a container for spent nuclear fuel. Virginia Power keeps its irradiated uranium and plutonium fuel rods underwater. The dry cask is a storage method it could employ in the future at its North Anna and Surry plants, where the nuclear waste would be buried intact.
Each fuel assembly consists of 204 rods in an array approximately eight inches square and 13 feet long. The lead and steel highway casks in which they are transported measure six feet in diameter by 16 feet long and can accommodate three such assemblies. To date, 66 assemblies have made the 2500-mile cross country trek in Idaho. In the future such assemblies may be routinely transported every few weeks from Virginia Power’s Surry facility to North Anna, a distance of 125 miles.
How safe are people who live along the way?
Very.
Tom Snow, supervisor of Virginia Power’s nuclear fuel operation, points out that regulations of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission are
95.5%