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Important Dates
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*All times are Central Time
September 9-11:
September 23:
October 12:
Regional Tribal Engagement (RTE) Work Group Quarterly Conference Call - 2 PM*
November 10:
Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee (MRMTC) Virtual Fall Meeting, Part I - 10 AM*
November 12:
MRMTC Virtual Fall Meeting, Part II - 12 PM*
November 16-19:
April 14, 2021:
Department of Energy (DOE) Site Visit - Dresden, IL
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Join Our List
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COMMITTEE HAPPENINGS
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Save the date(s)! The Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee (MRMTC) will be hosting its Fall Meeting virtually via Zoom on November 10, 10 AM - 12 PM Central Time, and November 12, 12 - 2 PM Central Time. Registration information and the agenda for both sessions will be sent to committee members and interested parties in the coming weeks.
Attendees can expect presentations from our federal partners in various Department of Energy (DOE) offices and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), committee business sessions, and a probable presentation on the progress made in the Vermont Yankee (VY) decommissioning and shipments. Speaking of the VY project, a major milestone was recently reached. Using its "high-capacity shielded MP197HB transport cask" for the first time, Orano completed a shipment of segmented reactor internals from VY to Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Texas. The MP197HB is thought to be the U.S.'s most robust and advanced dual-purpose transport cask. You can read more about the VY decommissioning and shipping project here.
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|  | | Dale Patrick, North Dakota, is retiring at the end of September. (Photo courtesy of the Bismarck Tribune) | |
Later this month, the MRMTC will be saying bon voyage to Dale Patrick as he retires from the North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality. Dale has been North Dakota's appointee to the MRMTC since 2015. Happy retirement, Dale!
In news from another committee, MRMTC staffers Lisa Janairo and Mitch Arvidson will be participating in the Tribal Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee's (TRMTC) Virtual Meeting on September 23. During this virtual meeting, Lisa and Mitch will present on the MRMTC's efforts to increase the region's engagement of Tribes. The MRMTC's Regional Tribal Engagement (RTE) Work Group has served the committee well and is an excellent example upon which other regions might build.
If you've been involved with the MRMTC for a while, you may remember the publication of the Transportation Issues Archive in 2010. This document compiled information on the transportation-related issues that the Midwest had encountered in the 20 previous years of working with DOE to develop the transportation system for a spent nuclear fuel (SNF) repository. Flash forward to today, and the preliminary draft of a 10-year anniversary update to the Transportation Issues Archive has been completed and is now with DOE for review. Keep an eye out for the publication of the 10-year update later this month!
Finally, Illinois' and Iowa's cooperative agreements with the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) have been renewed for FY 2021! These cooperative agreements help the states prepare and plan for shipments of transuranic (TRU) waste from Argonne National Lab (ANL) in Lemont, Illinois, to the WIPP site in southeastern New Mexico. There are currently no scheduled TRU waste shipments from ANL because the lab has exhausted its current inventory of shielded container assemblies (SCAs). Shipments should resume next year when more SCAs are obtained.
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NATIONAL TRANSPORTATION STAKEHOLDERS FORUM
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 If you have ever been frustrated by the National Transportation Stakeholders Forum's (NTSF) wiki site, you are in luck. During the last meeting of the NTSF Planning Committee (PC), the PC accepted the Midwest's recommendation to refurbish the wiki site and return it to its original purposes as a repository for NTSF meeting information, webinars, and Ad Hoc Working Group (AHWG) materials. A new AHWG will soon be stood up to determine how best to go about this wiki site change.
In other NTSF news, the Rail/Routing (R/R) AHWG held a web meeting on August 24. That meeting featured a presentation from Bob Montgomery, the President of the Association of State Rail Safety Managers. Jeff Moore with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) also provided a status update on the Safety Compliance Oversight Plan (SCOP) revision. During the meeting, the discussion turned to an incident that occurred in Bedford Park, Illinois, on June 4. On that day, a rail car containing radioactive material caught fire in a railyard operated by the Belt Railway Co. of Chicago (BRC). Kelly Horn of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency (IEMA) and Jeff Moore were both involved in the response to the incident and are both members of the NTSF R/R AHWG. They agreed to present on lessons learned from the incident at a future NTSF R/R AHWG meeting. You can find out much more in this month's Focus this Month below, guest written by Kelly Horn! |
| FOCUS THIS MONTH | |
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| | | Railcar fire in Bedford Park, Illinois, on June 4, 2020. (Photo courtesy of WGN Morning News) | |
Bedford Park Railcar Fire
At approximately 2:00 AM on June 4, 2020, a railcar carrying low-level radioactive waste (LLW) caught fire in the clearing yard of the Belt Railway Co. of Chicago (BRC) located in Bedford Park, Illinois. The railcar, manifested as LSA-1, contained a total consignment of 4.3 millicuries of Co-60, Cs-134, Cs-137, U-234, U-235, and U-238, and was en-route from Alaron Nuclear Services in Wampum, Pennsylvania, to WCS in Texas for disposal. A large portion of the waste in the railcar was un-irradiated zirconium fuel cladding which had contained fresh fuel at one point in time. The remaining portion of the load consisted of dry active waste and contaminated metals. BRC staff noticed flames coming from the subject car shortly after it and a second railcar loaded with LLW were humped, and notified the Bedford Park Fire Department. (Railcar humping is the process of coupling railcars using a surface gradient differential, or hump, to allow the railcars to slam into each other at low speeds.)
Initial attempts to extinguish the fire by the Bedford Park Fire Department were hindered because the railcar was located in an area of the yard that was not readily accessible to fire trucks. As a result, BRC response personnel used sand to cover the lid of the railcar in an attempt to prevent oxygen from entering the load. Over the next 24 to 48 hours, the fire would continue to periodically flare up and proved difficult to mitigate. At one point, response personnel attempted to flood the railcar with liquid nitrogen in order to displace the oxygen within the load, but as with other efforts, this proved to be a temporary solution as the contents of the load would eventually start to smolder. BRC response contractors finally reverted to burying the railcar in sand as a means of smothering the fire.
As response actions were taking place, health physicists from IEMA's Division of Nuclear Safety conducted dose rate surveys, contamination surveys, and conducted air monitoring in order to assess radiological impacts to responders, the general public, and the environment. Smears of railcars and other equipment in close proximity to the railcar fire or within the smoke plume did not identify removable contamination above regulatory limits and were mostly indistinguishable from background levels. Radiological data collected from the scene and source information were used by IEMA's Radiological Emergency Assessment Center personnel to complete a conservative dose assessment using the NRC's Radiological Assessment System for Consequence Analysis (RASCAL) code. The resultant worst-case public dose modeled was determined to be less than 1 millirem as close as 1/10th of a mile (528 feet) from the rail car. This distance was observed to be the nearest location to the railcar for which a member of the public could be located in an uncontrolled area.
As the event transitioned from the response phase to the recovery phase, IEMA granted Alaron reciprocity under their Pennsylvania radioactive materials license to conduct activities associated with the railcar fire operations. Operations included remediation, waste handling, and associated packaging and transportation. In parallel to these actions, the Illinois Commerce Commission (ICC) and the U.S. Department of Transportation's FRA conducted regulatory reviews and investigated the cause of the fire. At the time of this article's publishing, the cause of the fire is still unknown.
Alaron offloaded the contents of the railcar into intermodals and shipped the LLW, along with remediation waste, to Toxco Inc., located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for processing and disposal. In all, 42 intermodals were loaded and shipped to Toxco. Alaron also shipped approximately 287 cubic feet of contaminated water generated during fire suppression back to their Pennsylvania facility for processing. The railcar was repaired onsite and shipped back to Alaron's Pennsylvania facility for decontamination.
After review of remediation and post-remediation data provided by Alaron, IEMA released the area previously restricted due to the fire on August 12. IEMA is currently conducting a thorough review of the response and associated recovery actions and is planning on creating a lessons learned document to ensure effective and efficient procedures are in place for future events of this nature.
Thank you to Kelly Horn for guest writing September's "Focus this Month"! If other committee members are interested in writing an op-ed for our monthly newsletter, please contact Mitch Arvidson.
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NUCLEAR NEWS
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| | Duane Arnold Energy Center. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. NRC) |
Derecho Hit!
The Duane Arnold Energy Center, Iowa's only nuclear power plant, was scheduled to begin permanent decommissioning activities on October 30, 2020. Mother nature had other plans. On August 10, a "derecho" storm with hurricane-force winds swept across the Midwest, flattening corn fields, damaging grain silos, and knocking down trees. Duane Arnold was in the path of the storm. The nuclear plant lost connection to the electricity grid at about 1 PM, which triggered the plant's automatic reactor shutdown. Standby generators provided power to keep the reactor's cooling system running. The storm also caused extensive damage to the plant's cooling towers.
On August 25, the 622 megawatt (MW) plant's owner NextEra Energy Resources announced that it would not restart the reactor, effectively making Duane Arnold's decommissioning date about two months earlier than expected. NextEra said it was uneconomical to repair the damaged cooling towers and reboot the reactor for only two more months of operation. The plant opened in 1975 in Linn County, near Cedar Rapids. It's NRC license would have allowed it to operate until 2034, but its 2020 retirement date was announced in 2018. As part of its early decommissioning, NextEra committed to providing 340 MW from wind farms around Iowa.
North Dakota Develops Nuclear Waste Disposal Rules
Despite an existing law passed in 2019 banning the disposal of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) in North Dakota, the state's Industrial Commission approved new regulations in July meant to discourage HLW disposal if the existing law were overturned, thrown out, or ignored. The new rules require parties interested in drilling a test well to obtain an "exploration permit" from the state and financial assurances. This six-month "exploration permit" process would be followed by obtaining a "facility permit" that could also take six months to process. Before receiving this second permit, the disposal party would have to deposit at least $100 million into a state fund. If this permitting process were not restrictive enough, a facility would need to pay an annual operating fee of at least $1 million to the state and provide monthly activity reports. These rules and the 2019 law are probably in response to the abandoned Deep Borehole Field Test (DBFT) program that DOE tried to establish in 2016. The irony of these rules is that they would not have applied in the situation with DOE wanting to sponsor the test borehole project, since there was no intent to actually dispose of waste.
Somewhat related, in that a state government opposes efforts to store HLW and SNF in their territory, the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council (NIC) recently responded to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham's letter opposing the proposed consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) for SNF in New Mexico. In the letter, the U.S. NIC acknowledges the negative impact of waste disposal and the lack of a permanent repository on the potential for "revitalizing" the nuclear industry.
More Retirements
In addition to Dale Patrick's retirement mentioned in "Committee Happenings," there are a few other retirements of note in the world of radioactive materials transportation. Brian Rude, Vice President of External and Member Relations at Dairyland Power Cooperative, will soon be retiring after 20 years with Dairyland. Before joining Dairyland, Brian served one term in the Wisconsin State Assembly and four terms in the Wisconsin State Senate, including five years as President of the Senate. Mr. Rude was very active with both the MRMTC and the Midwestern Legislative Conference (MLC). Happy retirement, Brian!
Additionally, Bob Halstead, Executive Director for the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, announced his retirement earlier this summer. As the Las Vegas Review-Journal puts it, he is "[t]he man whose name is synonymous with Nevada's opposition to building a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain." Bob's career with the state spanned three decades under both Democratic and Republican governors. Best of luck to Bob!
Finally, as covered in last month's newsletter, Ken Niles retired from the Oregon Department of Energy (DOE) on August 31. Before he left, he published an op-ed in the Tri-City Herald describing what he learned while thinking about, talking about, reading about, and writing about the Hanford Nuclear Site for 30 plus years.
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Thank you for reading. Watch for the next edition to come out on
October 1, 2020.
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Missed a newsletter? Past issues are archived on the committee's webpage.
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Please do not reproduce or create new content from this material without the prior express written permission of CSG Midwest.
This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy under Award Numbers DE-NE0008604, DE-EM0004869, and DE-EM0005168.
This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.
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