Congress Bypassed in Bid to Speed A-Waste Disposal

After months of being at loggerheads with Congress, the federal government has decided to clear the way administratively to put the first barrels of radioactive waste into an $800-million New Mexico repository where the Energy Department says it can be safely isolated for all time.

Interior Department sources said Tuesday that the repository site on 1,400 acres of its land outside Carlsbad, N. M., will be transferred to the Department of Energy by administrative order rather than waiting for congressional action.

The transfer is supposed to remove the last major obstacle to the first large-scale test of geologic disposal of nuclear waste material, but officials in New Mexico vowed continued resistance.

Late last year, the Environmental Protection Agency gave the go-ahead for 8,500 drums filled with waste from nuclear weapons laboratories to be stored in the repository for a five-year test, leaving the land transfer as the last big step.

The facility, hollowed out of salt beds more than 2,000 feet below the New Mexico desert, has been completed for more than a year, but the transfer of jurisdiction over the site from Interior’s Bureau of Land Management to the Energy Department has been delayed by demands for further safety assurances and for about $250 million to improve highways to it.

Environmentalists and members of the New Mexico congressional delegation have insisted that the land transfer be done by an act of Congress so lawmakers would have an opportunity to pass on the facility’s safety.

The decision to proceed through an executive order, Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N. M.) said Tuesday, “breaks faith with the New Mexico congressional delegation and breaks a promise to the state.”

Richardson said that he will introduce legislation to block the transfer and will be prepared to join a legal challenge to the action.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project--WIPP, as it is commonly called--is designed for permanent disposal of plutonium-contaminated wastes from nuclear weapons facilities. Most of the waste for the test would come from the Energy Department’s Rocky Flats laboratory, where triggers were fabricated for all U.S. thermonuclear warheads, and from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, where the Rocky Flats waste has been temporarily stored.

Officials in New Mexico have insisted that the federal government provide $250 million to construct bypasses to take the specially designed waste trucks around several towns. The Energy Department has offered to provide the highway construction money over a period of 20 years.

Last month, Leo Duffy, chief of the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management, assured New Mexico Gov. Bruce King that safety issues would be settled before the department moves any waste to the site.