hot time in the city: which shipment mode for high level ... · hot time in the cities: which...

This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings.

HOT TIME IN THE CITIES: WHICH SHIPMENT MODE FOR HIGH LEVEL NUCLEAR WASTE AFFECTS URBAN AREAS MOST

Fred Dilger PhD ([email protected])

Black Mountain Research Henderson, NV 81012

Robert J. Halstead ([email protected])

State of Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Carson City, NV 89706

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the results of an analysis to determine the land types found adjacent to the routes that may be used to transport high-level nuclear waste (HLW) to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site. This analysis used a GIS-based model to contrast and compare the rail and truck shipment of HLW. Likely suites of rail and highway routes are identified, the urban, rural and suburban areas affected by the shipments are then also identified and the distance traversed for each set of routes is examined to determine the number of cities and urban areas affected. The study concludes with a comparison between the alternative route combinations on the basis of land use type, population, and population density.

INTRODUCTION

One aspect of the shipment of high level nuclear waste (HLW) to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site is the differential effects attributable due to mode selection. Although a preference for rail transportation has often been expressed, for its relative radiological safety impacts, this assertion has never been tested empirically regarding impacts on urban areas. Understanding whether or not rail or truck shipment of waste has greater effects can provide an additional benefit: understanding where the effects occur. This paper describes an analysis done to compare where the effects of shipping the waste would be felt. This analysis is useful because changes in the nation’s urban form and population distribution suggest that the densities between urban and suburban areas are becoming more similar and that the amount of rural area traversed by these shipments may be declining (1). The development of what Joel Garreau called “Edge Cities” that fulfill the same functions as traditional urban cores may be relevant for the shipment of HLW because of the configuration of the land use, the density of the population and the ease of response to emergencies (1). Edge Cities often develop at intersections of freeways and beltway systems around traditional urban cores. These beltway systems provide an alternative to traversing center cities that is not available for most rail shipments. In discussions about the impact of transporting HLW to Yucca Mountain, there has been an absence of empirical information about the actual alternatives. One issue that has

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This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings. arisen in these discussions is the relative impact, measured in route miles, of mode preference on urban, suburban, and rural areas. The question that arises is, specifically, does the mostly rail shipping scenario result in greater distance traveled through suburban and urban areas than the mostly truck scenario. This issue has also been raised by the American Association of Railroads (AAR) and specific railroads when stakeholders periodically propose Federal routing guidelines for rail shipments, based on the Federal highway regulations in HM-164, which require carriers to utilize routes that minimize shipments through highly populated area (HPAs). The railroad point of view is that rail routing guidelines based on avoiding HPAs are inherently inefficient, because mainline railroads are constructed by design to link major urban areas, the best maintained (and safest routes) are the mainlines that connect major cities, and the major carrier interchanges are located in urban areas. This study describes a test of this hypothesis.

LAND USE DENSITIES

Comparing the urban form through which most of the waste is shipped provides important information about overall transportation impacts, and is a particularly relevant consideration for the distribution of emergency response funds. This study calculates the HLW shipment miles through three different types of land use categories (urban, suburban, and rural) for the two primary cross-country shipment modes, rail and truck. The measurement of impact is route miles. A route mile is the distance a HLW route traverses a particular land use type. This analysis compares the mostly rail and mostly truck shipping scenarios for the proposed action evaluated in the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Yucca Mountain. The DOE proposed action, disposal of 70,000 metric tons uranium (MTU) at Yucca Mountain over 24 years, postulates a total of 53,000 cask-shipments in the mostly truck scenario, and 10,700 cask-shipments in the mostly rail scenario (2). The mainline rail network was designed to link, not avoid, major urban areas, and therefore traverses suburban and urban population zones. Cross-country rail routes to Yucca Mountain must traverse suburban and urban areas to access carrier interchanges. There are no Federal (USDOT) routing regulations for Yucca Mountain shipments that require rail routes to avoid highly populated areas. The Interstate highway system is constructed to allow truck shipments to either access or bypass major urban areas, and bypasses typically affect both suburban and rural population zones. Cross-country interstate truck routes to Yucca Mountain can access route interchanges at a variety of urban, suburban, and rural locations. Federal (USDOT) routing regulations (HM-164) require Yucca Mountain shipments to use interstate routes generally, and to use interstate bypass routes, where available, to avoid highly populated areas. Considering the geography of the existing rail network, current rail industry operational practices, and the absence of USDOT rail routing regulations, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the mostly rail shipping scenario would result in greater urban and/or suburban impacts, measured in total route miles.

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This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings. The DOE has categorized land uses into three types to refine how the impacts vary based on the land use. These three land use categories,, urban, suburban, and rural, have been built into versions of DOE radiological impact software (e.g. RADTRAN and Webtragis). This division is a useful one for understanding the relative population density of the urban areas potentially traversed by the shipments. The DOE has categorized these land uses according to the population densities. The DOE defined densities are shown in Table I.

Table I. Land Use Population Densities Defined by DOE

Land Use Type Population Density (per sq mi)

Urban more than 3326 Suburban 139 to 3326 Rural 0 to 139

Ref. 3. In order to examine the land use impacts of the alternate modes in a geographic information system (GIS), it was necessary to assigned densities to polygon features in a GIS. The Webtragis system relies on a cell-based assignment of population data. In order to determine the shipment miles through each type of area, it was necessary to find a similar geographic area to use as a proxy. Geographic features with densities similar to the DOE land use types had to be used. For the urban land use, the Census Bureau’s database of Central Business Districts (CBD) was used. This data is available from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics National Transportation Database (4). An approximate land use for the DOE’s suburban land use was more difficult to identify. The geographic area most similar to the suburban land use is the database of Census Place. Unlike the Metropolitan Statistical Area, the Census Place area typically considers both the terrain and the regional growth in their boundaries. The third land use, rural, consists of what is left in the coterminous US. Geographic land use areas used for evaluation are shown in Figure 1.

.

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Gulf of Mexico

Atl

AtlanticOcean

PacificOcean

Canada

Mexico

TX

CA

MT

AZ

NV

NM

ID

CO

OR

UT

WY

KS

ILNE

SD

MN

IA

ND

OK

WI

FL

MO

WA

GAAL

AR

MI

IN

LA

NC

NY

PA

MS

TN

KYVA

OH

SC

ME

WV

VT NH

MDNJ

MACT

DE

RI

Fig. 1. Geographic areas used for land use evaluation.

Using a GIS, each land use was extracted from within other land uses to avoid double counting population. That is, the Populated Places were removed-along with their populations and areas from the Census Place database. The Census Places were, in turn, removed from the remainder of the nation. The densities remaining after these operations are similar to the DOE land use categories. The expectation is that the rail mode will have the greatest impact on urban areas-that is that more of the distance covered by rail transportation will occur in urban areas and less will occur in suburban areas. Truck transportation should occur through less dense areas. METHOD AND PROCESS To calculate the types of urban form traversed by the alternate modes, it was necessary to aggregate the route miles for each land use type for the entire 24 year shipping program. Also, because many HLW routes traverse the same urban area, it was necessary to avoid double counting the various land use types. Three software tools were used to manipulate the data to complete the analysis. First, the routing information and network information was taken from the Webtragis program developed and maintained by Oak Ridge National Laboratory(5) . This program has an assigned network that has been specially adapted for the routing of HLW shipments. The actual rail and highway routes used in this study are from Webtragis. The program also provides a printout of the land type traversed. The routing problem solved by Webtragis is also called the “transportation problem” or the “Hitchcock problem” after F.E. Hitchcock who formulated the problem in 1941 (6). The question asked is: How can movement on a network be optimized? The solution to the algorithm used in Webtragis and most routing software is to calculate a route by minimizing the total impedance between the origin and destination. The routes define

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This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings. impedance as a function of distance and driving time for each segment along a route that minimizes these factors as shown below:

( ), ∑ + = i i T D Min L β α (1) where L = total impedance of a route; α = distance bias; Di = distance of segment i, miles; β = time bias; Ti = time required to travel along segment i, minutes.

Webtragis contains an option to save a single route as a shapefile. The shapefile is used by the ARCGIS software developed by Environmental Systems Research Inc. of Redlands California. The shapefile format has become the de facto standard for GIS programs. ARCGIS was used to collect and display all of the routes as individual routes. Although it is possible to perform all of the necessary calculations using ARCGIS, it remains difficult to coax out good scaled symbol maps using ARCGIS. An example is shown in Figure 2. To finish the analysis, a program called Maptitude by Caliper Corporation was used. This GIS provides a fast, elegant way to perform the necessary GIS operations and produce good results.

Fig. 2. ARCGIS Screen.

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Once the routes were developed for both scenarios (77 origin-destination individual routes for two modes, or 154 individual runs of the Webtragis software), it was necessary to sum the routes and overlay the routes on the various land use types. (Note that this study underestimates the urban and suburban route miles for the mostly rail scenario, because it does not include the cross-country truck shipments from six reactor sites which are part of DOE’s mostly rail scenario.) Graphically, the process used for both modes is shown in Figure 3.

Fig. 3. Method to determine shipment miles by land use type.

Implementing the analysis is a relatively challenging geographic problem because the routes must be overlaid with the areas considered in a way that does not double count shipments on each route. Further, the areas considered had to be clipped by removing smaller areas from within larger areas to prevent double counting population or area considered. The overlay and shipment procedures are show below in Figure 4.

1.Assign shipment numbers to each route

2. Combine all shipment routes to determine the sum of all shipments on The network.

3. Overlay routes on each land usepolygon

4. Sum the length of the shipment througheach land use.

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Fig. 4. Procedure to clip areas and overlay routes.

1. Files representing boththe streets and rail routesare assigned shipmentvolumes based on the Final EIS.

ShipmentsLink ID

2. The shipment numbersin the route files are assignedto polygons containing eachland use type.

ShipmentsPolygon ID

3. The land uses are then filled intothe street and rail routes by overlayingthe land uses with the line layers.This yields route segements thathave data that shows land usetype and shipment numbers. Shipments Landuse

4. In the final step theland uses and shipmentnumbers are aggregated intothe street and rail layers. Thisenables accurate calcuation ofshipment miles.

Shipments Landuse Length

It was necessary to assign the route miles to the land use types in a way that preserved the identity of each individual route. This was necessary to avoid double counting either route miles or shipments. It is also an unusual geographic problem, but one that will be very common as the Yucca Mountain Program proceeds. RESULTS There are a number of alternative routing operations available in Webtragis. In this case, the Highway Route Controlled Quantity Shipments are used on the default routes. Webtragis has the ability to designate alternative routes that have been considered as potential designated alternatives by the State of Nevada. These alternatives were not selected. The cross-country highway routes derived from the Webtragis outputs were generally the same as those in the Final EIS, (2) except for shipping sites in the southeastern States. The Webtragis routes used in this paper utilize Interstate 40 from Nashville to Barstow, for shipments from the southeastern States. In the Final EIS, shipments from the southeastern States were routed north and west, and utilized Interstate 80 from Omaha to Salt Lake City. The Webtragis truck routes to Yucca Mountain are depicted below in Figure 5.

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Fig. 5. Webtragis truck routes to Yucca Mountain.

The truck routes are laid onto the urban, rural and suburban areas, to produce the route miles traversing each of the land use types. The results are shown in Table II.

Table II. Yucca Mountain Truck Route Miles by Land Use Category

Land Use Category Mostly Truck Scenario Route Miles

Central Business District 110

Suburban and Urban 3,634

Rural Miles 15,074 The rail shipment of the waste is less straightforward than for truck shipments because of the complexity of railroad routing. For the rail routing, there are often a number of different railroads that serve an individual site. When multiple railroads were available, the highest class railroad was used. In Nevada, the analysis used the proposed Caliente rail corridor. No other constraints on the rail system were applied. The cross-country rail routes derived from the Webtragis outputs were generally the same as those in the Final EIS. (2) The commercial rail routes to Yucca Mountain are shown in Figure 6. (Highway routes from the six reactors that ship by truck, under the DOE mostly

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This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings. rail scenario, are not shown in Figure 6, and are not included in Tables III and IV. Barge-to-rail intermodal routes are shown in Figure 6, but not included in Tables III and IV.)

Fig. 6. Webtragis rail routes to Yucca Mountain.

The rail routes are laid onto the urban, rural and suburban areas, to produce the route miles traversing each of the land use types. The results are shown in Table III.

Table III. Yucca Mountain Rail Route Miles by Land Use Category

Land Use Type Mostly Rail Scenario Route Miles

Central Business District

192

Suburban and Urban

4,281

Rural Miles 16,599 The results for both modes are shown in Table IV. Comparing the two sets of route mile distributions, demonstrates that using rail as the preferred mode does, indeed, impact suburban and urban areas more heavily.

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Table IV. Yucca Mountain Mostly Truck and Mostly Rail Route Miles, Compared by Land Use Type

Mostly Truck Scenario Route Miles

Mostly Rail Scenario Route Miles

Central Business District 110 192

Suburban and Urban 3,634 4,281

Rural Miles 15,074 16,599

CONCLUSION

Compared to the mostly truck scenario, the mostly rail scenario for shipment of HLW to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository would clearly have greater impacts, measured by route miles, on suburban and urban areas. It must be remembered, however, that the analysis reported here underestimates impacts of the mostly rail scenario, because it does not include the additional urban and suburban highway route miles route miles from six eastern reactor sites which are part of DOE’s mostly rail scenario. Nor does this analysis include the urban and suburban barge and heavy haul truck route miles that are required from 24 reactor sites under the DOE mostly rail scenario. Moreover, the implications of these differences cannot be fully assessed until the impacts in specific suburban and urban areas are studied in detail. Under the mostly truck scenario, there would be tens of thousands of truck shipments, but only a few hundred rail shipments (along one rail route from Idaho to Yucca Mountain), and only a few urban areas in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada would be affected by shipments along both highway and rail routes. Under the mostly rail scenario, by contrast, many large cities would be traversed by both rail routes and truck routes to Yucca Mountain; in some cases, port cities would be traversed by rail and barge routes, or by a combination of rail, barge, and truck routes.

Based on the preliminary analyses conducted for this paper, the authors have identified a number of urban areas that might be especially heavily impacted by the mostly rail scenario. At least nine metropolitan areas would likely be traversed by both rail and truck routes to Yucca Mountain: Atlanta, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Nashville, St. Louis, and Salt Lake City. At least eight metropolitan areas could be traversed by both rail and barge routes to Yucca Mountain: Baltimore, Boston, Miami, Milwaukee, New Haven, New York, Norfolk, and Wilmington (DE). The authors plan to evaluate the impacts of the mostly rail and mostly truck scenarios on these metropolitan areas using the same methods and data sources utilized in this paper. Additionally, it should be noted that the vast majority of the route miles occur in rural areas for both modal choice scenarios. Whatever the differences in the degree to which the mode selection impacts urban and suburban areas, truck and rail routes to Yucca Mountain mainly traverse rural areas. The most heavily impacted rural areas would be those located West of the Mississippi River, where routes converge and traffic is

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This is a revised version of the paper presented at WM 2005, the 32nd annual Waste Management Symposium, in Tucson, Arizona, on March 3, 2005. This revised paper was not included in the WM 2005 conference proceedings. concentrated for long distances. Accident prevention and emergency response programs will need to address the needs of these rural communities. The larger point of this paper is that the Yucca Mountain program has reached a state of maturity that allows sophisticated transportation analyses to be performed. It is now not only possible, but necessary, to better define the scope of the Yucca Mountain transportation program, and to specifically determine where problems will occur, in order to better coordinate policy development and financial support to affected parties.

REFERENCES

1. J. GARREAU, “Edge City,” New York, Anchor Books (1991).

2. DOE "Final 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," (2002).

3. R.F. WEINER, D.M. OSBORN, G.S. MILLS, B. O'DONNELL, D. ORCUTT, T.

HEAMES, "RADTRAN/RADCAT User Guide," Sandia National Laboratories (2004).

4. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION, Bureau of Transportation

Statistics, "National Transportation Atlas Database," (2005).

5. P.E. JOHNSON, R.D. MICHELHAUGH, "Transportation Routing Analysis Geographic Information System (WebTRAGIS) User's Manual," Oak Ridge National Laboratory (April 2000).

6. J.R. EVANS, E. MINIEKA, "Optimization Algorithms for Networks and

Graphs," New York, Marcel Dekker, Inc. (1992).

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