New Mexico wants delay in radioactive waste storage

Wednesday, April 29, 1998 | 10:24 a.m.

The long-awaited opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project to bury defense-related nuclear waste in New Mexico may be delayed by critics who are skeptical that the $2 billion facility is ready.

The Environmental Protection Agency has said it plans to allow the $1.8 billion WIPP site near Carlsbad, N.M., to start receiving waste. However, EPA officials indicate Thursday's original deadline for signing the permit to begin operations there could be delayed. Instead a decision is expected later in May or early June.

The U.S. Department of Energy, WIPP's operator, has announced the first shipment will arrive by May 29. "We are ready to go when we receive the right word from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Secretary of Energy (Federico Pena)," DOE's Carlsbad Area Office Manager George Dials said.

Westinghouse, the managing and operating contractor at WIPP, declared its readiness in February.

But New Mexico's Attorney General Tom Udall has warned that he may sue the U.S. government to halt the plutonium-contaminated waste stream containing trash, tools, rags and clothing from nuclear weapons production facilities, most of them in the West.

"I think that's a very ambitious schedule," Udall said this week. After the federal EPA permits the facility to open, the state could take up to a year to issue its own environmental protection permit, he said.

Udall fears that the underground nuclear dump drilled into salt caverns might leak if oil and gas developers drill into the radioactive defense wastes. The repository will become "a pressurized canister of radioactive waste, waiting to burst upon the next intruder," he said.

The 850,000 canisters to be buried underground in the next 35 years could rust in the bedded salt and generate hydrogen gas under high pressure, Udall said.

New Mexico has asked for safety assurances. If the state doesn't get them, New Mexico could sue the DOE and the EPA, Udall said.

The National Academy of Sciences has already said the waste would be safely isolated for 10,000 years at the facility. A total of 6 million cubic feet of the waste is expected to be buried as DOE weapons sites close around the country.

Federal sites in Nevada, California, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, New Mexico, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee and South Carolina plan to ship waste to be stored permanently in underground caverns carved out of the salt beds. The Nevada Test Site is shipping its plutonium wastes there.

Unlike the high-level nuclear waste that DOE wants to ship to Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the nuclear waste heading for New Mexico is known as "transuranic" waste. It is considered low-level waste, but it has an unusually long contamination life, most of it due to plutonium. That radioactive life makes it important to keep contaminated materials in stable storage indefinitely.

While the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will send plutonium-laced soils and other materials to WIPP, it won't happen immediately. The earliest shipments will come from the Idaho, Rocky Flats and the Los Alamos laboratories.