Banking On Cold War’s Trash as Treasure

This isolated potash mining town in the arid New Mexico range-lands is so hungry for radioactive garbage that it plans to welcome the arrival of the first toxic truckload with street celebrations and ribbon cuttings.

Barring a court injunction, and presuming safe passage through an anticipated gantlet of protesters, the party will start within a few weeks when a truck hauling contaminated trash from the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab rumbles down the city’s main drag on its maiden voyage to the first underground storage site for nuclear waste.

Eventually, this sleepy blue-collar community best known as “the Gateway to Carlsbad Caverns” hopes to become a bustling international center for research on nuclear waste dumps.

No other place has stepped up to provide a solution to the monumental problem of what to do with the Cold War’s carcinogenic detritus of clothing, filters, sludge, glassware and gloves tainted with plutonium that will remain radioactive for 240,000 years.

Critics say locals have been taken advantage of by the federal government and large corporations that, as one put it, “desperately need a place to put this poison.” They also point to a recent survey showing that Latinos hold 15.4% of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s jobs--a number that is less than half the percentage of Latinos in the Carlsbad work force.

Still, the community leaders who sought out, landed and then fought for WIPP for two decades insist that they are pioneers on the edge of some profitable, post-nuclear frontier. Just laying the groundwork for the $2-billion project has bestowed a patchwork of benefits on the town’s 27,000 residents--and brought stability to an economy that for decades had bounced along like a tumbleweed.

And they expect a lot more before the 35-year project achieves its goal of entombing 850,000 55-gallon drums full of waste in vaults carved out of salt beds 2,150 feet beneath the surface of the Earth about 26 miles east of here.

“We did the feds a very big favor by taking this radioactive junk off their hands, and they know it,” said former Carlsbad Mayor Bob Forrest. “So we kiss them in public and beat them up behind closed doors. We’ll never be satisfied with what they have done for us. We will always want more. And by God, we’ll get it.”

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In return for bringing nuclear waste to Carlsbad’s doorstep, the Department of Energy is funneling $20 million a year into state coffers for local highway improvements, and millions more for job training centers and a monitoring and research facility where residents can have their body radiation level measured at no cost.

Westinghouse Electric Corp., the government’s primary WIPP contractor, has become Carlsbad’s top business donor. Each year, the company gives about $200,000 to local nonprofit groups. Moreover, its executives donate hundreds of hours of volunteer work to Carlsbad’s charities and civic activities.

Take Joe Epstein, who heads WIPP operations for Westinghouse. He is a member of the boards of the Carlsbad Department of Development, the chamber of commerce, the boys and girls club, and the local mental health association. He also calls bingo at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall, sings in a church choir and officiates rubber duck races in a canal that runs through town.

His company paid for an overhaul of the sound system at the city’s banquet hall. It also lent Carlsbad its top Washington lobbyists to resolve a dispute with federal officials over the boundaries of a flood plain map. The result: The redrawn map saved hundreds of Carlsbad families from having to pay hundreds of dollars each year for flood insurance.

Epstein said Westinghouse’s high-profile community involvement is part of being a good corporate neighbor: “After all, we live here too.”

The influx of WIPP scientists, engineers, security officers and corporate executives has sparked a development boomlet here at a time when the potash mining industry is laying off workers amid a flurry of consolidations.

New homes are selling for an unheard-of $150,000--even higher along the shallow and muddy Pecos River. A car dealership with a $1.5-million showroom and a Wal-Mart are under construction.

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During a Rotary Club meeting, George Dials, the Department of Energy’s manager of the WIPP site, asserted that Carlsbad is ready to take the next step.

“The dream that Carlsbad will become a center for nuclear waste research and development is entirely possible,” Dials said. “The prospects for a bright future can be a reality. The infrastructure is in place. The educated work force is in place.”

That kind of talk riles antinuclear groups in Denver and Santa Fe, N.M., that have vowed to try to block shipments of radioactive waste en route here with acts of civil disobedience.

To hear them tell it, a catastrophe is all but certain at the WIPP site or along transportation routes that will be used to move 37,000 shipments of waste from across the nation.

“Carlsbad’s good turn for the Energy Department is going to blow up in its face,” said Kansas City attorney Robert Eye.

“Nothing is foolproof--it may take generations to discover the darker facts about this project,” he said. “Their risk assessments do not take into account potential dangers along transportation routes to Carlsbad, or the long-term health implications.

“I hope they enjoy their celebration, because it’s going to be their last one. I also regret that their children’s children will be left holding the radioactive waste bag.”

Dials disagrees.

“It’s insulting to folks here for outsiders to say the town’s been bought off,” Dials said. “Does anyone really believe that the safety of a town’s children could be compromised for a few thousand dollars?”

Nita Smith, executive director of the Carlsbad Boys and Girls Club, would answer, “No way.”

“When I need help, anything at all, I call Westinghouse,” Smith said. “Yes, a few folks are concerned that these WIPP people, who are not home grown, are suddenly involved in our business.

“I say, ‘So what,’ ” she said. “Just last November, Westinghouse’s grand pooh-bah, their big guy, came to town and donated $50,000. We got $10,000 of it. We gave him a polo shirt and a thank-you card.”

Betty Richards, who operates a trailer park here and constitutes one-third of the entire organized anti-WIPP movement in town, sees a secret objective in the corporate largess: Eliminate dissent.

“This town is sewed up,” she said. “It’s politically incorrect to say anything against WIPP. If you do, they will call you a hippie freak communist pinko rag-tag not concerned with the interests of the community, or the country.

“But they are wrong,” she said. “WIPP is simply siphoning off bad stuff to hide it in a place where no one will care. It’s a shell game.”

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A recent 235-page study on the socioeconomic impact of WIPP on Carlsbad had another bone to pick with the project: Its benefits have spread only marginally to local Latinos, who largely remain in lower paying, nonmanagerial jobs.

“Broadening employment opportunities to Hispanics and to women as upper-level managers remains an unfulfilled need at the WIPP,” said Terry Marshall, a sociologist and author of the Energy Department study.

Sammy Lopez, editor and publisher of the Carlsbad Current-Argus, said the issue will be examined by his 8,500-circulation daily newspaper.

WIPP officials said they are taking the study’s findings seriously. For now, however, their priority is preparing a subterranean saline gallery roughly the length of a football field to begin receiving radioactive waste.

On a tour of WIPP’s caverns, it took five minutes for a creaky cage elevator to plunge into the black void of a narrow shaft leading to an enormous chamber with sagging roofs and walls encrusted with sparkling salt crystals.

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A one-mile journey by golf cart ended at a side tunnel, where the helmet lanterns of WIPP workers glowed in the darkness of the designated final resting place for the first truckload of waste.

“We will put a huge plug at the end of this tunnel when it’s full,” explained WIPP spokesman Donovan Mager. “Seven to eight years after that, the walls of this room will collapse. In 100 years, the salt will congeal into a solid form, cocooning the waste.

“America should feel good about that. The waste will be safely isolated from the environment for 240,000 years instead of laying around above ground like it is now.”

It had better be safe, said Forrest, the former mayor.

“You can buy someone a drink, give them a set of tires or a free dinner to get them on your side, but you get them a job, and you’ve got a buddy for life--that’s what WIPP has done for Carlsbad. But if you think we fought hard to get that project in here, you ain’t seen nothing till you see us fighting to get rid of it if things go wrong.”