Feb 26 - McClatchy-Tribune Business News Formerly Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News - Stacy Shelton The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Two South Carolina sites are in the running for a federal initiative that could send thousands of truckloads of nuclear waste through metro Atlanta.

Proponents of the plan say it's safe and that nuclear materials have been transported through the state before without incident.

But transport is the least of the concerns of environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists who oppose President Bush's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

They are more concerned about what will happen if Savannah River Site, a federal facility near Augusta that made nuclear weapons materials during the Cold War, or a landfill for low-level radioactive waste next door in Barnwell, S.C., are chosen for the nuclear initiative.

If the U.S. Department of Energy selects one or both, opponents fear they will become the de facto Yucca Mountain. The Nevada depository is the only long-term solution for the country's nuclear waste, but it's at least 10 years away from opening and is gaining opposition.

Robert Guild of the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club warned that his state "will become the world's nuclear waste dumping ground."

But backers of moving the materials to South Carolina say the concerns are overblown. Many are people who have lived close to SRS and its nuclear materials for decades, and they say there have been comparatively few problems.

Local supporters also estimate the initiative could bring 7,000 jobs.

"The nuclear industry is the most highly regulated industry in the world and is one of the safest," said Carl Gooding, a council member from nearby Allendale County, S.C.

The Energy Department is considering 13 locations nationwide for one or more components of the president's global nuclear initiative, which is still years from reality.

Details of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership still need to be worked out -- including taxpayers' cost -- but the first phase of the plan calls for collecting used nuclear fuel, or spent nuclear rods, from commercial reactors and shipping it to a reprocessing facility where it would be converted into fuel for a commercial reactor.

The spent fuel, which would be shipped in stainless steel and lead casks, could come from any of the 65 nuclear reactor sites in the United States. most of them east of the Mississippi River.

Eventually the program would help U.S. companies sell the reprocessed nuclear fuel abroad for electricity.

The Department of Energy is scheduled to narrow its choices of sites for the program, and which companies could run it, by the summer of 2008.

Savannah River Site already has about 37 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste in large tanks, some of which are more than 50 years old and leaking. Every year, the federal government spends more than $1 billion a year on cleanup at SRS.

But at a Department of Energy public hearing this month, federal officials heard many positive comments about the proposal for the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership from elected representatives and business leaders eager for the economic boost. Jobs and the tax base in the region have eroded since SRS started ramping down in the 1980s.

Scott MacGregor, vice president of the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce, said the partnership is "the type of forward-thinking Augusta is proud of ... together we can meet the needs of the future."

Residents of Augusta and, just over the state line, the South Carolina communities of Aiken, North Augusta and Jackson, are accustomed to the 198,000-acre nuclear facility, which has operated in their backyard for more than 50 years.

Several generations of families have gotten their paychecks from SRS and no major accident has occurred. A report by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently predicted a minimal risk of cancer for people living nearby.

Proponents and opponents of Bush's plan agree the adjacent South Carolina sites both have a good chance for two reasons. The location is close to many of the nation's nuclear reactors that will provide the waste for reprocessing, and to major ports. Second, a reprocessing facility was built in Barnwell, near SRS, in the 1970s, but never opened.

Much will depend on congressional support. Congress sliced this year's proposed funding from $380 million to $120 million.

Jim Hardeman, manager of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division's Environmental Radiation Program, said if a South Carolina site is chosen, there's a good possibility most of the shipments of spent nuclear rods would either be trucked around I-285 or railed through downtown Atlanta, winding past Philips Arena and the state Capitol.

"Some of the maps they've put together to show nuclear waste transportation to Yucca, flip around and show them going to Savannah River Site," Hardeman said. "That's kind of what it would look like."

Government officials say the transportation of spent nuclear rods poses minimal risks to the public. According to the Department of Energy, a person standing 6 feet from a truck carrying casks full of spent nuclear fuel for one hour would receive a radiation dose equivalent to a chest x-ray.

They also say terrorism risks are minimized by keeping shipment routes and schedules secret. Only a designee in the governor's office of each state on the route is notified, officials said. Some shipments get law enforcement escorts.

Train and traffic accidents are always possible, but in 50 years of shipping radioactive material in the United States, there have been fewer than a dozen traffic accidents and no release of radioactive material, said James Giusti, spokesman for the Department of Energy.

When the Department of Energy studied transportation routes for Yucca Mountain, it concluded a release of radioactive material is likely to occur twice in 10 million years. Such an event would not cause even one cancer death, the government said.

Hardeman, with Georgia's EPD, said his office is monitoring the latest proposal for the Savannah River Site.

If the South Carolina sites are chosen, it won't be the first time radioactive material has traveled over Georgia roads and rails.

Starting in 2002, about six tons of bomb-grade plutonium was trucked through Georgia from a Colorado nuclear weapons plant to Savannah River Site. South Carolina's governor at the time, Jim Hodges, protested the shipments. He unsuccessfully sued the federal government over concerns that it did not have a plan for permanently storing the material.

In a separate plan already approved and in the works at Savannah River Site, many more plutonium shipments are slated to begin once the government completes construction of a new plant there: the fuel facility.

The plant will convert weapons-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel to produce electricity. The $1 billion facility will bring thousands of radioactive truck shipments to and from SRS and over Georgia roads.

Among the proponents of South Carolina's sites are Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.). In a joint letter read at a February hearing before the DOE, they said nuclear energy is "safe, affordable and environmentally friendly."

"Be careful what you ask for," says Glenn Carroll, coordinator for Nuclear Watch South in Atlanta, formerly Georgians Against Nuclear Energy. "We already have 35 million gallons of high-level waste [at Savannah River Site], and we don't know what to do with it."