Wednesday, March 5, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
The Nevada Test Site may shed some of its radioactive waste from 45 years of nuclear weapons activities, but shipments will never pass through Las Vegas.
If the Waste Isolation Pilot Project near Carlsbad, N.M., opens in November, shipments of radioactive wastes from the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, will take a six-mile trip down U.S. 95 to Highway 373, then to Route 127, where trucks will take Interstate 15 from Baker to Barstow, all in California.
After that, truckloads of waste will move across Interstate 40 through Arizona and to New Mexico.
But Nevada's wastes won't move immediately.
Early shipments will come from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site near Denver and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said Chris West, WIPP's external affairs manager.
WIPP, in the southeast corner of New Mexico, will become the first permanent mid-level nuclear waste disposal site. Mid-level waste includes contaminated clothing, lab equipment and machine parts. WIPP will not accept commercial radioactive waste, but only that waste generated by the Department of Defense for weapons research.
Such waste is currently stored in 55-gallon steel drums and wooden boxes at various DOE sites across the country. The shipments will pass through 22 states on the way to New Mexico.
In contrast to mid-level waste, high-level nuclear waste comes from irradiated reactor fuel and from bomb-making activities. So far, it has no permanent disposal site, although Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is under study by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The Test Site has been storing mid-level wastes while WIPP has been under rigorous scientific review, West said.
The DOE has investigated WIPP's salt caverns since the 1970s. WIPP's network of salt caverns have been stable for thousands of years 2,000 feet beneath the desert's surface.
A National Research Council committee said the caverns can keep the radioactive wastes from the environment for more than 10,000 years, provided human activities don't disturb the salt caverns.
Lawsuits could delay WIPP's opening, West said. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has already been sued by the state of New Mexico to stop the project, he said.
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