Glowing and rolling through Georgia

Who cares if the feds want to store more than 100,000 truck loads of nuclear waste deep inside some mountain in Nevada?

Atlanta commuters should, because there’s a good chance that you might be stuck in traffic right next to a truck carrying 240 times the radioactive material released at Hiroshima, according to a new study released by the Georgia Public Interest Research Group.

Over the course of 38 years, 20,667 trucks or 3,518 rail shipments carrying nuclear waste will come through Georgia, heading for the Yucca Mountain waste depository in Yucca Mountain, Nev.

The trucks will travel down Interstates 75, 85 and 20, and the rail lines go right through Atlanta.

Some more good news: Because of size and weight limitations, the Department of Energy can’t build containers that don’t leak radiation.

According to a PIRG analysis of the Department of Energy’s own studies, trucks carrying the nuke waste will emit the equivalent of one chest X-ray per hour to those who are stuck in traffic nearby.

The Energy Department says that, over the past 30 years, there have been 2,700 shipments of nuclear waste without a single release of harmful radiation and the nuclear waste shipping containers are the most robust in the industry.??