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Has tech made moving nukes safe enough? Depends whom you ask

RENO, Nev. (AP) — The plutonium core for the first atomic weapon detonated in 1945 was taken from Los Alamos National Laboratory to a test site in the New Mexico desert in the backseat of a U.S. Army sedan.

Officials put other bomb parts inside a metal container, packed it into a wooden crate and secured it in the steel bed of a truck under a tarp, the U.S. Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration says in a historical account.

Grainy black-and-white photos show special agents and armed military police accompanying the shipment nearly 75 years ago.

“Nuclear materials transportation has evolved since then,” the department posted online last year.

Today, radioactive shipments are hauled in double-walled steel containers inside specialized trailers that undergo extensive testing and are tracked by GPS and real-time apps.

But whether shipping technology has evolved enough to be deemed safe depends on whom you ask.

The Trump administration’s revival of a decades-old plan to move the nation’s most dangerous radioactive waste to a remote spot in the Nevada desert has reignited a long-running fight in the courts and Congress over how to safely get the hazardous remnants of decades of bomb-making and power generation to a permanent resting place.

“It seems to me, that part of the gist of the government’s argument is that, ‘We’ve been doing this a long time. We know what we are doing. You have to trust us,'” noted U.S. District Judge Miranda Du, who is considering a lawsuit Nevada filed against the Energy Department over weapons-grade plutonium secretly being sent there.

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For its part, the government says there are no safety concerns.

The Nuclear Regulatory Agency in charge of regulating the commercial nuclear power industry says more than 1,300 shipments of spent fuel from nuclear power plants have been completed safely over the past 35 years. Four were involved in accidents, but none resulted in a release of radioactive material or a fatality due to radiation exposure.

The Energy Department’s Office of Secure Transportation has moved radioactive material more than 7 million miles (11 million kilometers) “without incident, with no recordable accident,” said Phil Calbos, assistant deputy administrator for defense programs at the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

“Over time we’ve continued to improve techniques, procedures, equipment to make sure these are as hard of a target … and as safe of a vehicle as you can imagine,” he said.

But there have been close calls, said Robert Halstead, an analyst who has studied the dangers of transporting radioactive waste for 35 years and is head of Nevada’s Agency for Nuclear Projects.

A truck crash in 1971 killed a driver and propelled a cask full of nuclear waste into a ditch in Tennessee. The container was damaged, but no radioactive material leaked.

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