U.S. Approves 1st Permanent Tomb for Atomic Waste

The Clinton administration Wednesday approved the first permanent storage of nuclear waste deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

Barring court injunction or an unlikely congressional override, the decision clears the way for the shipment of radioactive material to a cavernous tomb hollowed out of an ancient salt formation nearly half a mile under the southeastern New Mexico desert. Shipment of the waste by truck could begin as early as next month.

Most of the contaminated material, the detritus of Cold War weapon-building, has been sitting in drums and above ground at 23 temporary storage sites, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., 15 miles east of San Francisco Bay.

James Owendoff, acting assistant Energy secretary for environmental management, called the decision “an important part of the solution to cleaning up the thousands of tons of nuclear waste produced during the Cold War.”

But by launching the first geologic nuclear trash heap, the decision also breaks new ground at a time when final decisions have not been made on whether to deposit commercially generated nuclear waste at another site in Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Use of the New Mexico salt deposits, left by a retreating ocean perhaps 250 million years ago, has been under consideration since 1974. In 1992, the Energy Department came within weeks of shipping waste there, only to be stopped by a federal court injunction.

One of the most active opponents of the plan argued Wednesday that the injunction remains in effect--and said that, if it isn’t, his group would seek a new order blocking the operation.

“What they’re doing is inappropriate, unsafe and illegal,” said Don Hancock, director of nuclear waste safety programs at the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque environmental group.

Conceding that more legal action is likely, George Dials, the senior Energy Department official in Carlsbad, N.M., 26 miles from the waste site, said: “There’ll be more lawyers than engineers working on this in the near future.”

The trash, known as transuranic waste, is made up of sludge, filters, tools, rags, protective clothing and glassware that came into contact with plutonium, americium and other extremely toxic isotopes used in nuclear weapons and then became radioactive. But the waste does not contain the most highly radioactive fuels of thermonuclear explosions, for which permanent storage has not yet been approved.

Since 1980, the federal government has spent $2 billion preparing the New Mexico site, Energy Department officials said. The annual operating cost of the site, known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, is expected to be $185 million.

The tomb of salt that it encompasses is about 2,150 feet below the desert surface, atop a pool of brine. It has been carved into chambers with space for 176,000 cubic meters of waste--approximately 850,000 55-gallon drums, officials said. The Energy Department’s inventory of such waste is expected to reach 140,000 cubic meters.

The waste is contained in carbon steel drums, which will be loaded aboard trucks for shipment from sites as distant as a nuclear weapon plant in South Carolina, the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state and a nuclear laboratory in New York state. Energy Department officials predicted that the transportation could begin as early as June 19, if it is not blocked by a court order.

Noting that the radioactive material is now stored in metal drums “in proximity to the nearly 53 million people who live within 50 miles of these 23 sites across the country,” Owendoff said that disposal of the waste in the salt formations, which have been geologically stable for more than 200 million years, “will ensure that it will remain isolated from human contact and will greatly reduce any risk to our citizens.”

The radioactive material that would be buried has a half-life of 24,000 years, scientists believe. This means that over 24,000 years, its radioactivity would decay 50%--and it would remain a danger to humans for about 240,000 years.

Removing the last major governmental hurdle to the project, the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday certified that the plant meets its standards to protect public health and the environment from radiation. The Energy Department’s application supporting its request for EPA approval filled 100,000 pages with studies and comments, the department said.

But Marc Fioravanti, a project engineer at the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a private, nonprofit organization in Takoma Park, Md., that often takes issue with Energy Department programs, raised questions Wednesday about whether the site can contain radiation over thousands of years.

“They’ve had problems with water leakage, cracks in the ceiling and floor, and pressure from oil and natural gas reserves in the area,” he said. In addition, he said, drilling for oil and gas could send brine into the caverns, raising the possibility that radiation could migrate out, possibly to the surface.