COLUMN ONE : Seeking a Future in a Graveyard : The U.S. is ready to test deep desert salt vaults as a tomb for radioactive waste. The project may dictate whether nuclear energy has a future.

Twenty-six miles out in the Eddy County Badlands, among the rattlers, owls, and kangaroo rats, miners have excavated 800,000 tons of salt from a massive formation that has lain undisturbed since the shallow Permian Sea disappeared from the West 225 million years ago.

Now, a five-minute elevator ride beneath the desolate red sand of southeastern New Mexico, huge, empty, dimly-lit rooms hollowed out of the rock salt await the arrival of thousands of barrels of plutonium-contaminated refuse from America’s nuclear weapons plants.

This is to be the United States’ first nuclear graveyard, a long-delayed, furiously debated repository where the Energy Department proposes to demonstrate that nuclear waste, some of which will remain poisonous for almost 300,000 years, can be left through the ages, safely isolated from the environment.

Much more is riding on this project, however, than the $800 million that the Energy Department has spent on it or the mountain of toxic refuse generated in the course of manufacturing nuclear warheads.

Because this is the first attempt to get rid of radioactive waste permanently, the success or failure of the Eddy County project will have a bearing on similar plans for disposal of the millions of spent fuel rods accumulating at about 115 commercial power reactors across the country.

And, at a time when U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources is on the rise again and some analysts believe the nation must think again about nuclear power, the question of whether radioactive waste can be disposed of safely will have far-reaching consequences.

In fact, what happens in the effort to open the New Mexico repository and the battle over Yucca Mountain in Nevada may ultimately determine whether there is any future at all for nuclear power.

After 10 years of political and technical pulling and hauling, a battering of the Energy Department’s credibility and the scrapping of one scheduled opening after another, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins is about to announce his own plan for putting the first drums of radioactive waste to perpetual rest.

He has already told Congress that he hopes the vaults--formally known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP--can be opened in October or November for an elaborate five-year test program. Later this month, he is expected to fill in the blanks on how he proposes to do it.

Looking beyond nuclear weapons waste, the federal government proposes to entomb the used fuel elements from commercial nuclear power plants deep inside Yucca Mountain south of Las Vegas, and that project has already encountered deeper pitfalls than those so far survived by the defense waste dump here.

There, the Nevada Legislature has made it illegal to deposit nuclear waste in the state, and the U.S. Justice Department has responded by filing suit to obtain access for federal experts to evaluate the site.

The weapons plant waste that would be sent to WIPP poses a different kind of environmental threat than the nuclear fuel rods that would be entombed in Yucca Mountain.

‘Cooler’ Waste

More than 95% of the material bound for the WIPP tomb is so-called “contact-handled” waste, meaning that the drums can be handled without protective clothing and pose no danger as long as they remained sealed. Unlike the nuclear power plants’ spent fuel rods, which decay by the emission of X-ray-like gamma radiation, plutonium decays by the emission of alpha particles, which will penetrate nothing more dense than paper.

Plutonium is, nevertheless, monumentally toxic as well as long-lived.

Already, the struggle over the New Mexico project has brought to a crescendo all of the regulatory, environmental, scientific and political disputes that have for half a century made the nuclear waste issue intractable.

As a result, the outlook for WIPP is uncertain. A decade after its authorization by Congress, and several months after completion of basic construction, the pilot project still faces imposing regulatory hurdles, environmental lawsuits and unabated opposition from anti-nuclear activists who see keeping the site empty as a way to keep the aging, polluted nuclear weapons complex idle.

The battle over WIPP and the mounting backlog of waste have pitted states against states, governors against the federal government, the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency against each other and officials of the blue-collar potash mining town of Carlsbad, N. M., against potters, writers and boutique owners in Santa Fe, which is near the Los Alamos test site and on the most practical truck route from nuclear sites in other states.

Huge Backlog

With opening of the project apparently in reach, New Mexico’s Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici, who led efforts that would have cleared the way for testing the repository two years ago, now counsels caution. He warns of pressure from Idaho and Colorado, where backlogged waste stores have created a crisis atmosphere.

Energy Secretary Watkins, a one-time nuclear Navy admiral, made the opening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project one of his most urgent priorities when he took over the troubled Energy Department early last year.

But he soon discovered that--while the nation’s nuclear weapons-building system is a polluted disaster whose cleanup will cost an estimated $19 billion over the next five years and eventually as much as $200 billion--the schedule for a 1989 WIPP opening was fantasy.

The project has since slogged through an overhauled opening plan, surmounting nearly two dozen important milestones. Among them, it has issued a massive 13-volume supplemental environmental impact statement and gotten Nuclear Regulatory Commission certification of a redesigned waste shipping container.

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to set aside one of the two chief remaining obstacles to the test program. Responding to a petition from the Energy Department, it proposed to approve putting 4,500 drums of mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes into the caverns.

Ironically, the hang-up was not radioactivity but that 60% of the plutonium-contaminated waste from weapons plants is also tainted with hazardous chemicals such as industrial solvents.

In declaring war on toxic waste dumps, Congress in 1976 banned burial of any kind of hazardous waste unless it was first treated or there was proof that it could not migrate away from the disposal site. The provision threatened to delay disposal of defense refuse for years. But, accepting the Energy Department’s evidence that the waste will be safely contained in drums during the five-year test, EPA agreed to permit drums to be put into the salt.

Now, having heard testimony from about 300 witnesses, many of them bitterly objecting to the variance, the EPA is expected to finish drafting its final order in September.

But even with the hazardous waste fight set aside, enough disputes remain that many skeptics expect the caverns to remain vacant for months, if not years.

“I certainly hope the secretary will not announce a date for opening,” said Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “I have been telling him for months: ‘Please don’t set deadlines, because you alone are not in control. There are too many uncertainties, too many people just waiting for the opportunity to stop this.’ ”

Watkins has heard similar warnings from both New Mexico senators, Domenici and Democrat Jeff Bingaman.

Aside from a probable challenge to the EPA decision by environmental groups, the remaining obstacle to opening the gates for the first truckloads of waste is the transfer of the 10,000-acre WIPP site from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to the Energy Department. Until the transfer is made, either through legislation or an administrative order by the Interior secretary, no radioactive material can be brought in. Several weeks ago, the Administration sent proposed legislation to Capitol Hill, but it provides none of the $250 million the state of New Mexico wants to construct bypasses so waste trucks headed for WIPP can skirt Santa Fe and five other communities situated on routes to the site.

For this reason, as well as unhappiness with provisions bearing on health and safety, the state government and congressional delegation are solidly against it.

Interior Department officials are understood to to be preparing to make the land transfer administratively if Congress refuses to act in the next few months. Bingaman and Domenici have declared strong opposition to such a move, and other members have warned that it would grievously damage relations with states over the whole touchy waste issue.

Anita Lockwood, New Mexico’s secretary of energy, minerals and natural resources, suggests that the state may go to court if the Administration attempts to open the repository for the test program without congressional approval.

“We think an administrative action would be a clear violation of the Federal Land Management Policy Act,” she said. “We believe that only congressional action could provide adequate health and safety features for the people and the environment, and only a congressional bill could address the compensation issues.”

The controversy over WIPP has been stirred by concern over waste-laden trucks rolling into New Mexico from across the country.

Along Santa Fe’s St. Francis Drive, protest signs identify the thoroughfare as the “WIPP Route,” and property owners have become fearful that property values will plunge. In old Santa Fe, many shop owners who fear that waste traffic could damage the tourist business display signs identifying themselves as “Another Business Against WIPP.”

Critics of the project raise the specter of terrorist attacks on the shipments and challenge the judgment of allowing the trucks to cross the country without security escort. They say the waste shipping containers, which look like three giant thermos bottles, make the trucks conspicuous.

Transport plans have indeed encountered sufficient troubles. Trupact I, the first shipping container designed for WIPP trucks, was abandoned, and a new circular one was created. After being subjected to 200-degree flames for 30 minutes, dropped onto eight-inch spikes from a height of 30 feet and subjected to a battery of other tests, it was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last summer.

The first 15 Trupact II containers had to be rejected, however, because the manufacturer machined some of the welds below the minimum acceptable thickness.

Given what they consider extraordinary precautions, Energy Department officials insist that loaded trucks bound for Eddy County will pose far less hazard than the thousands of unmarked tankers, loaded with hazardous cargoes, rumbling down highways every day.

During the five-year test period, only three to five trucks would arrive at the repository each week, but the government has already trained 6,000 emergency personnel in communities along the transportation routes, and plans are to continue yearly sessions as long as the repository is open. The trucks themselves will be equipped with tracking devices that permit them to be followed by satellite, and, once shipments are in full swing, Energy Department officials say, a communications center in Oak Ridge, Tenn., will be able to pinpoint their location within feet.

It has been 35 years since the now-defunct Atomic Energy Commission proposed the idea of permanently disposing of nuclear waste in deposits of salt, first planning to use deposits near Lyons, Kan., at the opposite end of the great Permian Basin from Carlsbad.

Across the years, weapons plants have accumulated, in barrels and boxes, nearly 2 million cubic feet of so-called transuranic waste--gloves, shoes, uniforms, tools, floor sweepings and sludge contaminated with man-made radioactive elements.

This does not include the same kind of material that was simply buried in unlined trenches during the 1950s and ‘60s--most of it at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, where shipments totaling more than 2 million cubic feet were dumped into the ground before orders were issued for interim storage in a retrievable fashion.

The Energy Department’s plan for the Waste Isolation Pilot Project calls for 4,500 barrels of radioactive trash--0.5% of the eventual capacity--to be trucked here over a three-year period and lowered into the 2,150-foot-deep chambers for the final demonstration that the repository can safely contain 6.2 million cubic feet of the refuse for a minimum of 10,000 years.

If a go-ahead can be obtained for full scale operation after that, backlogged waste and new refuse being generated would then be hauled here from the weapons installations in California, Nevada, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee and South Carolina, as well as New Mexico’s own Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Over 25 years, 56 of the 300-foot-long storage rooms would be filled with stacks of 55 gallon drums. About 100,000 cubic feet of high-level waste contained in lead-lined casks will be inserted snugly into holes drilled into the walls.

Permanent Seal

In less than a century, the walls and ceilings of the storage rooms and passageways, backfilled with loose salt, will gradually close upon themselves, crushing the drums and boxes--theoretically sealing the waste forever as the beds settle back into place.

But critics of the project continue to insist that there is some danger that enough water will accumulate to form a slurry, which could get into aquifers and find its way into the Pecos River, which runs through Carlsbad.

Experiments carried out in the absence of nuclear materials have over recent months produced both good and bad news for project scientists.

Strain gauges attached to the walls, ceilings and floors of the storage rooms show the salt is closing at a rate two or three times faster than expected, and there is evidence that the rock is less permeable than had been expected.

Both findings are encouraging in that they reduce the concern about the accumulation of moisture.

But the lack of permeability is also a matter of concern because destruction of organic materials continues to produce gas for a few hundred years. If the gas does not penetrate the formation, it might be trapped in bubbles that would prevent the resealing of the chambers.

EPA Hearing

At an EPA hearing in Santa Fe several days ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council released an internal EPA memo suggesting that the Energy Department has grossly underestimated the accumulation of gases in the repository and raising the possibility of an underground explosion. EPA officials said the memorandum, written last summer, was taken into account before it issued its proposed order in April, and that the agency does not now regard an explosion as a serious possibility.

However, EPA experts are at work rewriting regulations about the long-term containment of buried radioactive materials. The Energy Department and officials of the WIPP project hope that the court-ordered revisions to clear up ambiguities will give them more latitude, but there is a possibility that more stringent standards will mean soaring costs and more long delays.

Experts have already put three years of effort into the revisions. They hope to publish a draft by the end of this year, and put the regulations into final form by 1992. The standards are contained in the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. Among other things, they require the Energy Department to evaluate the probability of some human intrusion causing a radiation escape from the repository thousands of years after it had been sealed and left beneath the desert.

Stable Forms

Anticipating a possible tightening of these regulations, officials are looking to the possibility that waste destined for WIPP after it becomes operational might require time-consuming and massively expensive conversion into other more stable forms.

“Otherwise, we could comply with regulations now,” said James Bickel, the WIPP project chief in the Energy Department’s Albuquerque field office. “We could put the stuff in the ground in its present form, seal it and walk away.”

There are several possible ways to stabilize the waste. Among them are burning it and incorporating the radioactive ashes into cement, shredding and mixing into a grout or superheating to create a vitrified form resembling solid glass. A report on the options is due to be completed this month.

At the very least, all of the thousands of barrels of backlogged waste will be examined one by one to confirm their specific contents before shipment to New Mexico. Each will be X-rayed, enabling inspectors to see what is inside; checked to assure that it contains no more than a pint of free liquid, and equipped with a special vent to permit the escape of gas created by organic decomposition.

Old barrels showing signs of rust or damage will be “overpacked” in steel boxes before being loaded into shipping containers; some will have to be repacked to meet 18 criteria for acceptance.

The pressure to get moving with WIPP escalated dramatically in October, 1988, when Idaho Gov. Cecil D. Andrus announced that the state would no longer accept the waste generated from the Energy Department’s Rocky Flats plant outside Denver. With drums rapidly accumulating at the plant, where plutonium triggers are fabricated for nuclear warheads, Colorado Gov. Roy Romer announced a waste storage limit of 1,601 cubic yards at the plant and vowed to shut down operations at Rocky Flats if his limit was exceeded.

The plant’s shutdown for safety reasons a year later eased the waste crisis.

Watkins also announced that new measures, including the use of a sophisticated trash compactor, would permanently reduce the waste output.

But, with the department pushing to reopen Rocky Flats this summer, an independent advisory committee has warned that the Colorado site has only space enough to store waste for six months of operation.

Opening WIPP for testing would take some of the pressure off Rocky Flats, but Idaho’s governor is also demanding that that the Energy Department begin removing the barrels in interim storage at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.

There, 2.3 million tons of waste have been dumped in the ground, and only 600 feet of volcanic rock separate the dump from the 10,000-square-mile aquifer used to irrigate much of southern Idaho. There appears to be little likelihood that opening the New Mexico repository will do anything to resolve this problem.

“The first thing we want to do is get rid of the organic stuff,” said Leo Duffy, director of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management. “The organic solvents are toxic, they are carcinogenic and they migrate. They also cause the radioactive material to be stripped off and to migrate at a faster rate.”

Scientists are looking at the possibility of inserting electronic probes into the trenches and vitrifying the garbage with temperatures of 3,000 degrees or more once the organic material has been removed.