Route Identification Project: Final Report to the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management

The member states of the Council of State Governments' Midwestern Radioactive Materials Transportation Committee feel that route selection for shipments under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) should begin with a regional review of available routes, since states are in a better position than the federal government to judge the quality of potential highway and rail routes through their jurisdictions. Through its cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Midwestern committee asked for and received permission from DOE to undertake a project in which the region would analyze available rail and highway routes and propose a potential suite of routes to DOE as a starting point for national discussions about routes for NWPA shipments. To identify potential routes for the work group to evaluate, the CSG staff used DOE’s own routing model – Transportation Routing Analysis Geographic Information System, or TRAGIS. This GIS-based model evolved from two earlier DOE-developed models that predicted routes for highway, rail, and barge transport. DOE offices having been using TRAGIS or its predecessors since 1979 to analyze potential shipping routes. The Midwest’s route identification project analyzed routes only from shipping sites located in the Midwest. The final maps represented the Midwestern states’ suggested starting point for national discussions that will result in DOE’s selection of routes for shipping spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste under the NWPA, assuming Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the destination. The final report was published in December 2005.