Test site to export waste to New Mexico

In all, 23,700 cubic feet of transuranic waste will be trucked to the newly opened Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad, N.M.

"That is a switch. It's good," said Stephen Mellington, acting assistant environmental manager for the Department of Energy's Nevada Operations.

Trucks won't begin hauling the test site's hoard of transuranic waste - most of it in 1,656 metal drums that could fit in a high school gymnasium - for about two years.

"It's not a priority," Mellington explained while on a tour of the waste management facilities at the test site, 75 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

He said other sites in the U.S. complex where nuclear weapons were developed or manufactured, such as the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory or the Rocky Flats, Colo., facility, take precedence over waste that's stored in an isolated facility in the 1,350-square-mile Nevada Test Site.

The first shipments to the WIPP site began March 26 when a tractor-trailer carrying huge cylinders filled with waste from the Los Alamos, N.M., national laboratory rolled through the repository's gate in the pre-dawn hours amid cheering by several hundred employees and visitors.

A month later, on April 28, the first interstate load of truwaste from the Idaho engineering lab was hauled to the $2 billion repository for disposal.

Truwaste, short for transuranic waste, is for the most part tainted with plutonium.

Unlike low-level radioactive waste shipments, which in the past have crossed Hoover Dam, the route for transuranic waste runs from the test site south on U.S. Highway 95 to state Route 160 through Pahrump to Interstate 15 near Las Vegas, continuing southwest to Interstate 40 in California and then east across Arizona to New Mexico.

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