Radioactive Waste Arrives at Facility in New Mexico

The inaugural load of radioactive waste arrived Friday to herald the opening of the nation’s first permanent nuclear waste repository. Federal officials called it a step toward solving the problem of where to put waste from decades of weapons work.

Carlsbad residents, who live about 25 miles from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, cheered the truck and held up homemade cardboard signs reading, “Welcome finally” and “It’s about time!” as the rig rolled through before dawn.

Earlier in the trip and further north, the truck faced a scattering of protesters, including two young women who sat down in the road and a man who tried to block the highway with his car.

The load rolled out of Los Alamos National Laboratory shortly before 8 p.m. MST Thursday, its original early-morning departure time delayed by heavy fog along the 270-mile route.

After a 7 1/2-hour trip, the truck passed through WIPP’s white metal gates at 3:36 a.m. MST to the cheers of about 500 employees and dignitaries and shouts of “It’s about damn time!” The driver honked in response.

“I’m ecstatic--this is just the culmination of everything I’ve worked for for 25 years,” said Wendell Weart, a Sandia National Laboratories scientist who was instrumental in creating the repository.

“It’s been one roadblock after another, and we finally got them behind us,” Weart said, beaming at the 18-wheeler carrying three huge steel containers bearing the black-and-yellow radiation symbol.

The arrival of the first shipment marked more than two decades of effort to open the $1.8-billion repository, first proposed in 1974. The first truckload is expected to be placed underground by Monday.

Until now, the United States has had no permanent resting place for weapons-related plutonium waste.

As a result, waste has been piling up at 23 DOE installations around the country, such as Rocky Flats near Denver. At many of those installations, waste is kept mostly in 55-gallon drums on above-ground concrete pads, underneath bubble structures or in berms.

Eventually, about 37,000 shipments will fill WIPP’s network of storage rooms and become entombed by salt over the next 30 years.

An appellate court in Washington and a federal judge in Santa Fe on Wednesday rejected last-ditch appeals from environmentalists who sought to scuttle the transfer.