![]() ![]() 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. 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. 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. On the contentious points, he pledged constructive negotiations. New Mexico’s draft permit contains “areas of fairly significant agreement,” White said. 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. But officials have acknowledged they need to do better in New Mexico as nuclear waste piles up nationwide. The Energy Department declined to comment on how the proposed permit conditions would affect operations. The permit “becomes a way to stop WIPP, and it would be a tragedy to stop WIPP.” “The way that is written is absolutely absurd and makes no sense,” he said. Nuclear industry opponents who influenced the state’s draft permit have little understanding, Heaton said, of the facility’s safeguards. ![]() ![]() 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. 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. They want more nuclear facilities, including on a nearby private site where a developer plans to store spent fuel from civilian reactors. Local officials, hoping to wean off boom-and-bust industries like oil, see WIPP as a stable economic driver and good neighbor. The state’s stance infuriates community leaders in Carlsbad, a town of 32,000. “We need authority to stop shipments, to stop waste streams, to require investigations if there are problems.” “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. New Mexico also wants the Energy Department to begin looking for repositories in other states. 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.īut 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. People in Carlsbad, New Mexico, near WIPP, have always liked it for the jobs. 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. Since 1999, the Energy Department has used it for one of the world’s largest environmental cleanup missions. WIPP is the only geologic repository for nuclear waste in the country. 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.
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