By CHARLENE PAUL
The Progress
A nuclear reactor vessel from southern California’s decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station slowly made it’s way through the Coyote Springs Valley on Monday, June 29.
At about 5:30 am the convoy left the Apex Industrial Park in North Las Vegas. The 770-ton load on a 122-foot-long trailer powered by six heavy-duty Class 8 trucks began its one-way, 400-mile trip to a disposal site in the desert in Clive, Utah.
Lumbering down the northbound US Highway 93 at only 4 to 6 miles per hour, the convoy didn’t pass the State Highway 168 interchange at Coyote Springs Golf Course at around 5:30 pm that evening.
The vessel’s trip to Utah began on May 24, 2020, when the 770-ton low-level reactor vessel left southern California on the world’s largest rail car, a 40-year-old, 36-axle Schnabel car weighing 2.2 million pounds. (It is believed that this was the rail car’s last load.)
Once the load arrived at Apex, it took a couple of weeks for cranes to lift the reactor from the train car and put it on a 45-axle, 180-tire trailer for the trip to northern Utah.
Experts with the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) worked long and hard to ensure that the state’s roads wouldn’t be damaged as the load passes through.
Two railway tunnels east of Caliente along with rock outcroppings that are too tight to allow the reactor to be shipped by rail to Salt Lake City and then on to Clive, made travel on the highway a necessity.
“It would be, by far, the biggest object ever moved on a road in [Nevada],” said NDOT spokesman Tony Illia. “Our people have been scratching their heads for months to figure out a route that could work. It won’t move until the transportation department issues a permit 24 hours before hitting the highway.”
“The record-sized move over state highways marks the culmination of over a year of planning and coordination across three states,” Illia said. “At 2.4 million total pounds, it’s the heaviest load to ever cross Nevada roadways.”
Making such a massive shipment in summer months is a much bigger issue than it would be in colder months. Asphalt or other road surfaces could easily buckle under the over 1.5-million-pound reactor plus a shipping skid that adds seven tons to the total weight. For the load to be transported safely, drainage structures along the way needed to be reinforced.
“The structures would get crushed like a soda can because the load is so heavy,” said Illia. “Heavy equipment operators with Emmert International [among the world’s biggest movers of heavy equipment] plan to use heavy-duty hydraulic jacks to support culverts when the vehicle hauling the reactor passes over.”
To keep the load off Interstate 15 and Interstate 80, the travel route will follow U.S. Highway 93 and State Route 318 before crossing into Utah.
Interestingly, the route passes by the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. The mountain was to be the nation’s nuclear waste repository, but the plan was terminated in 2008 amid a political battle over its safety. When the San Onofre plant is completely dismantled, all of its low-level waste will be buried in Utah.
The extreme weight of the super-load is dispersed across 460 total tires to prevent damage to state roads and bridges. Pilot cars and Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) vehicles are escorting the rig. The full convoy is almost two miles long, including extra trucks, mechanics, and project managers. Because of the weight, travel averages four to six miles per hour, and the 400-mile trip is estimated to take eight days.
On the first day of the trip, the convoy stopped at the Coyote Springs turn-off on Highway 93. On July 1, the convoy stopped just south of Alamo, Nevada, and did not travel from July 2 through July 5 to minimize impacts on travel over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
Mobile messaging signs will be used to inform drivers of delays and detours.
2 thoughts on “Spent Nuclear Reactor Passes On Its Way To Disposal”
It’s both interesting and disturbing that the SONGS Unit 1 reactor pressure vessel is being buried without taking a single archival specimen from the component. The neutron-induced damage during its operation caused significant embrittlement of the largest irreplaceable component in a nuclear power station. Because the extent of the damage remains an open issue with numerous knowledge gaps that only the harvesting of real time aged vessel wall and beltline weld materials for laboratory analysis, there were numerous requests by scientific agencies, including staff from the national laboratories and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do an autopsy before burial. Meanwhile, the NRC and the nuclear industry are pushing operating licenses at other reactors out to 80 years blind to the consequences of aging. Think about what happens to a baked wine glass from the oven when you fill it with cold water, and imagine that happening during a nuclear accident.
Do you know the area they are in this week? We would like to see it.