September 20, 2007
Nuclear Waste Rail Routes through Lincoln County Going to be More Expensive

By Dave Maxwell

If the Department of Energy (DOE) really does go ahead with plans to build a railroad corridor through Lincoln County to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, it’s going to cost a lot more money than they have projected.

Vaughn Higbee, reporting on behalf of Robison/Seidler, a Las Vegas based consulting firm, told the Lincoln County Commissioners at their regular meeting last Monday, that new information has shown the cost of building the railroad line will be a lot more than anyone first anticipated.

Higbee said he has recently been on inspection tours of the two Robinson/Seidler recommended routes with Jerry Parker, a retired railroad builder with 42 years experience. The route given final recommendation to the County Commissioners is called the Cottontail route. Higbee said that after seeing it, Parker said that route, along with any of the others being considered had one glaring problem: Trains don’t go up hills, not steep grades anyway. And to make more than a 1.5 percent grade for the railroad to travel will cost more money because of a tremendous amount of tunneling and cut-and-fill that will be needed to build the line and keep it at a 4800 to 5000 feet elevation. It will also make the routes longer, Higbee noted, than what had first been thought, requiring many more switchbacks in order to wind through the county to get from Point A to Point B.

If the DOE goes ahead and decide to build, “it will be more expensive than they believe, Higbee said.

Parker has been helping Higbee, along with Larry Lytle, try to find a route that would keep the national standard DOE wants. However, Parker told Higbee that making routes at a steeper grade above national standards will also be more difficult and expensive to maintain the rails and ties and probably require more engines to haul the material over the steeper grades. This would all be in addition to the extra expense of constructing the line.

Higbee said that Parker thinks the Cottontail route, the one most recommended by Robinson/Seidler to the LC Commissioners, as well as the Short Route, (the second choice) are both possible, but “It requires a tremendous amount of effort to do that. It would require tunneling, bridges, cut-and-fill, etc.” Higbee reported that another engineer, Jeremy Drew, has also looked at the routes and come to much the same conclusions.

Another problem that Higbee foresees with all of this is that more people are going to be impacted by the rail corridor than had been hoped. “The more miles that it goes through Lincoln County, the more people it’s going to impact. It is going to be more invasive than what they are anticipating. Far more than what I anticipated. More miles and more country that’s going to be disturbed,” he said.

Commissioner Wade Poulsen also pointed out all these new problems are just what are in Lincoln County. Esmeralda and Nye counties are another set of problems for DOE all over again.