A Transportation Risk Assessment Tool for Analyzing the Transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste to the Proposed Yucca Mountain Repository

Abstract

The Yucca Mountain Transportation Database was developed as a data management tool for assembling and integrating data from multiple sources to compile the potential transportation impacts presented in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for a Geologic Repository for the Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel and High-Level Radioactive Waste at Yucca Mountain, Nye County, Nevada (DEIS). The database uses the results from existing models and codes such as RADTRAN, RISKIND, INTERLINE, and HIGHWAY to estimate transportation-related impacts of transporting spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste from commercial reactors and U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) facilities to Yucca Mountain. The source tables in the database are compendiums of information from many diverse sources including: radionuclide quantities for each waste type; route and route characteristics for rail, legal-weight truck, heavy haul. truck, and barge transport options; state-specific accident and fatality rates for routes selected for analysis; packaging and shipment data by waste type; unit risk factors; the complex behavior of the packaged waste forms in severe transport accidents; and the effects of exposure to radiation or the isotopic specific effects of radionclides should they be released in severe transportation accidents. The database works together with the codes RADTRAN (Neuhauser, et al, 1994) and RISKlND (Yuan, et al, 1995) to calculate incident-free dose and accident risk. For the incident-free transportation scenario, the database uses RADTRAN and RISKIND-generated data to calculate doses to offlink populations, onlink populations, people at stops, crews, inspectors, workers at intermodal transfer stations, guards at overnight stops, and escorts, as well as non-radioactive pollution health effects. For accident scenarios, the database uses RADTRAN-generated data to calculate dose risks based on ingestion, inhalation, resuspension, immersion (cloudshine), and groundshine as well as non-radioactive traffic fatalities. The Yucca Mountain EIS Transportation Database was developed using Microsoft Access 97{trademark} software and the Microsoft Windows NT{trademark} operating system. The database consists of tables for storing data, forms for selecting data for querying, and queries for retrieving the data in a predefined format. Database queries retrieve records based on input parameters and are used to calculate incident-free and accident doses using unit risk factors obtained from RADTRAN results. The next section briefly provides some background that led to the development of the database approach used in preparing the Yucca Mountain DEIS. Subsequent sections provide additional details on the database structure and types of impacts calculated using the database.