EPA's approval of nuke dump expected

A nuclear waste dump built into an underground salt bed beneath southeastern New Mexico's desert is expected to receive approval to open from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today.

The Department of Energy proposed the $1.8 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), 26 miles outside Carlsbad, in 1974 and faced numerous delays. The EPA gave preliminary approval of the site in October.

If approved, it will take 30 days from today for the facility to begin accepting radioactive waste, unless the state of New Mexico or environmental groups sue to stop it.

The waste destined for the WIPP repository will consist of contaminated protective clothing, tools, equipment, sludge and soil which became radioactive during Cold War nuclear weapons development.

Unlike the high-level nuclear waste that the 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 radioactive waste, but it has an unusually long contamination life, most of it due to plutonium.

WIPP is expected to receive 37,000 shipments during its 30-year life. The contaminated materials will come from 10 federal sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina and Washington.

The Nevada Test Site will send plutonium-laced soils and other materials to WIPP in about a year.

Scientists chose to bury the waste in the salt bed partly because salt creeps over time. Once a salt cavern is filled with waste, nature will take its course and collapse the walls and roof in seven to nine years, encapsulating the waste.

That expectation troubles New Mexico's Attorney General Tom Udall and environmentalists.

Udall has warned the government he will sue to halt the waste shipments. He said he fears that the underground nuclear dump might leak if oil and gas developers drill into the radioactive defense wastes. The 850,000 canisters destined to be buried there could rust in the salt and generate hydrogen gas under high pressure, Udall said.

Environmental activists such as Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, N.M., question the DOE's assurance that pockets of brine won't bring radioactivity to the surface.

"We're going to sue them," Hancock said, adding that the EPA approval is illegal.

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