Many Roads to Travel: Alternative Approaches to Route Selection for Yucca Mountain Shipments

This paper examines the routing implications of the potential shipment of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to the proposed repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. The authors describe a model which can be used to evaluate the impacts of transporting spent nuclear fuel nationally and in the State of Nevada. The authors used this model to evaluate the cross-country highway routes identified in the DOE's Final Environmental Impact Statement and three alternative routing scenarios. The authors evaluate these routing scenarios based on four attributes: counties, exposed populations, total county populations, and shipment miles. The authors further evaluate the impacts of these alternative routing scenarios on two selected corridor states. The authors conclude that routing decisions have significantly different impacts on different state and local governments