If the DOE and the state of New Mexico collude to allow 3.2 million gallons of high level nuclear waste from Hanford, Washington to be stored at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, it would be a blatant and disgusting betrayal of public trust.
Federal and state officials promised New Mexico citizens time and time again over the last 25 years that high-level nuclear waste would never be stored in WIPP. “Oh no, we will never do that.”
And, of course, that’s the one thing everyone’s always been worried about.
WIPP’s football field-sized storage rooms are in salt beds nearly a half a mile underground. The waste they contain is considered to be low level – tools, fabrics, machine parts and the like that have touched plutonium, not the plutonium itself. Even though WIPP was a “pilot project” probably in name only, it was never designed as a test for the storage of large quantities of really hot material – at least as far as we can tell from the public records.
But now the Albuquerque Journal, in a Sunday editorial last month, has not only endorsed the idea but has claimed that it might be the “only option” for securing some of Hanford’s nuclear waste.
There are so many other options for that waste that it’s appalling WIPP is even being considered, much less endorsed, by the state’s leading conservative newspaper.
The Hanford nuclear reservation is gigantic – more than 568 square miles, the majority of them far from the Columbia River. The terrible pollution at Hanford, however, is near the river because reactors making plutonium need vast amounts of water to keep them cool.
Hanford is a mess. It produced the plutonium that was at the heart of nearly 60,000 nuclear warheads. It’s considered the most polluted of all DOE’s nuclear research and production sites. The waste from making huge quantities of plutonium includes staggering amounts of radioactive nitric acid used to separate plutonium from other materials created in the site’s reactors before they were all closed down and cocooned in the late l980s.
According to the Washington Department of Ecology, a state agency, the processing resulted in 53 million gallons of very hot, plutonium laced liquid waste stored in largely single-walled underground tanks, as well as 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, and about 200 square miles of polluted aquifer beneath the plant and near the river. It’s as close to a national disaster as you can get.
The troubles at Hanford are representative of the conditions at most of DOE’s 100 or more nuclear processing and manufacturing sites. It gives substance to the fears that many New Mexicans have about Los Alamos National Laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, and about WIPP. It’s not as if the nuclear military industrial complex has an efficient, vigorous, and transparent history of cleaning up its waste. It does not.
But no matter how terrible Hanford’s problems might be, New Mexico can’t help solve them by agreeing to a deal that sees the DOE shipping this monstrous stuff across the highways of the West and through or near New Mexico towns and cities. And then trying to store it in a facility that wasn’t designed to take it. They should keep the horrible stuff at Hanford where the DOE is already preparing to stabilize the waste.
Because WIPP by law cannot take liquid waste, the 3.2 million gallons of radioactive material would have to be mixed with cement or a similar material. In that state, it no longer poses a problem to the Columbia River and could be stored on site with appropriate protections. I’m not sure of the technology, but that would also be the form the plutonium would take if it was shipped to WIPP. It’s hard to imagine shipping tons and tons what might resemble radioactive cement blocks across the country. It all seems preposterous in the first place.
The DOE at Hanford is also spending $12 billion or so to build a vast vitrification plant to put those other 50 or so millions of gallons of radioactive waste into glass and then store the glass in metal containers. The plant has been experiencing many technical problems, however, and won’t up and running until 2019. And all the waste won’t be vitrified until somewhere around mid-century if everything goes as planned.
So why did the DOE designate WIPP as the “preferred alternative” for storing hot waste form Hanford, when the idea is clearly illegal? Does the DOE want to build more WIPPs near Carlsbad? Does the Martinez administration secretly want to see southeastern New Mexico turn into the new underground “Yucca Mountain”? Why all the enthusiasm for this terrible idea?
The promises to never store high level radioactive waste at WIPP go all the way back the last administration of Bruce King in the early l990s. And the 1992 WIPP Act – supported by Senators Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman -- banned high-level waste from ever being stored there. Governor Bill Richardson in 2003 confirmed the ban.
There’s absolutely no compelling reason to lift it now.
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