A half-mile underground beneath a windswept field in the southeast corner of
New Mexico, hundreds of workers haul drums of radioactive waste into a salt mine that will entomb them for at least 10,000 years.
Up on the surface, federal officials overseeing the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) are working harder than ever to smooth over tensions with state officials and skeptics in the state capital so the facility can meet its mission: cleaning up the country’s nuclear weapons production sites.
WIPP is the only geologic repository for nuclear waste in the country. Since 1999, the Energy Department has used it for one of the world’s largest environmental cleanup missions.
The mine employs about 1,500 people and now holds drums full of roughly 2.6 million cubic feet of tools, clothing, soil, and
other objects contaminated by research and development of the atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race.
People in Carlsbad, New Mexico, near WIPP, have always liked it for the jobs. That kind of community support for storing nuclear waste will need to be replicated if the US is to meet President Joe Biden’s goal of decarbonizing its power sector, relying partly on nuclear power plants.
But New Mexico regulators — under pressure from nuclear opponents, who worry the state has become a nuclear waste dumping ground — want the authority under a 10-year hazardous waste permit to halt shipments if they see an environmental or health threat or if new
legislation from Washington increases its disposal limit. New Mexico also wants the Energy Department to begin looking for repositories in other states.
“We need to reclaim our authority in many ways that the permit is going to do,” said James Kenney, the state’s environment secretary, who says the Energy Department has treated New Mexico as an afterthought. “We need authority to stop shipments, to stop waste streams, to require investigations if there are problems.”
The state’s stance infuriates community leaders in Carlsbad, a town of 32,000. Local officials, hoping to wean off boom-and-bust industries like oil, see WIPP as a stable economic
driver and good neighbor. They want more nuclear facilities, including on a nearby private site where a developer plans to store spent fuel from civilian reactors. They, and others in the nuclear industry, have touted that project as a model for the department’s efforts to garner community consent for nuclear waste.
WIPP is a “marvelous project and a national treasure,” said John Heaton, a former Democratic state representative from Carlsbad, who has an honorary room in the mine complete with an autographed bolt hammered in the ceiling.
Nuclear industry opponents who influenced the state’s draft permit have little understanding, Heaton said, of the
facility’s safeguards. “The way that is written is absolutely absurd and makes no sense,” he said. The permit “becomes a way to stop WIPP, and it would be a tragedy to stop WIPP.”
The Energy Department declined to comment on how the proposed permit conditions would affect operations. But officials have acknowledged they need to do better in New Mexico as nuclear waste piles up nationwide.
When state officials complained about the department’s shortcomings, “I took that to heart,” said Ike White, who leads the department’s Office of Environmental Management, which has a $8.3 billion annual budget and more than 30,000 employees and contractors working on
waste cleanup at 15 sites in 11 states.
New Mexico’s draft permit contains “areas of
fairly significant agreement,” White said. On the contentious points, he pledged constructive negotiations.
Cheering the Waste
In the 1980s, Congress established a national nuclear waste disposal program that sought to set up repositories for different categories of waste from weapons sites and civilian power
plants.
Lawmakers designated Yucca Mountain, about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, as
the country’s sole burial site for spent nuclear fuel and the most highly radioactive waste. The plan eventually foundered due to strong public and political opposition in Nevada, and as a result, US nuclear waste remains stored around the country at 75 nuclear power plant sites in 33 states.
Things went differently in New Mexico. The Carlsbad area was confronting a downturn in industries that had sustained it. Potash mining struggled to compete with cheaper imports. An oil and gas drilling boom hadn’t yet arrived, and unpredictable commodity price swings challenged local
budgets.
When Congress passed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act in
1992, the facility moved forward. WIPP would store up to 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic waste, a designation that includes contaminated clothing, rags, soils, tools and other elements. It was expected to fill up by 2024, but the law didn’t stipulate a closure date.
As the first trucks with waste passed through Santa Fe, dozens of protesters jeered them, horrified that their communities were subjected to the threat of an accident that would sicken hundreds of people.
But when the shipments arrived in Carlsbad, hundreds of people cheered along the highway. Scientists, miners and construction workers flooded the area to build and operate the
site.
“It really changed the whole DNA of our town,” said Jack Volpato, chairman of
the Carlsbad mayor’s nuclear task force.
WIPP appears unremarkable at first. Beige
buildings, a hoist and a mound of mined salt emerge from the grassland about a 40-minute drive from Carlsbad.
Inside the heavily guarded security gate, the site is busier than at any time since the 2014 incident.
rews work on a new ventilation system. Workers check waste that arrives in double-lined steel shipping casks on semi-trailers to ensure they meet WIPP’s criteria, and then take them 2,150 feet underground — a five-minute elevator ride into the pearly white walls of the Delaware Basin.
Workers haul the drums through the vast underground network, geothermally heated to about 82F at all times. Salt crunching under their boots, they navigate with handheld maps, posted coordinates and color-coded emergency escape routes. The drums are
stacked in rooms nearly as long as a football field. Workers often end their shift with a salty aftertaste.
The salt seam is naturally elastic, WIPP officials say, so when one panel closes, the salt gradually collapses and molds tightly around the drums. Elsewhere, mammoth mining machines chew new passages through the seam, installing bolts to keep the migrating salt at bay.
‘Against Forever WIPP’
WIPP today is 42% full, and shipments could run another 60 years before hitting the legal limit, according to department estimates. Delays stem from slower-than-expected waste cleanup and a 2014 radioactive release at WIPP that halted shipments for more than three years.
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