There is a unique opportunity to provide your comments about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s Legacy Transuranic Waste Disposal Plan. The disposal plan describes WIPP’s strategies to keep the disposal site for plutonium-contaminated hazardous wastes open for 60 more years, despite WIPP’s promises to New Mexicans to close in 2024.
Comments are due to WIPP on or before Friday, January 3rd, 2025. Sample public comments you can use are available on the Stop Forever WIPP website. https://stopforeverwipp.org/home You can review comments already submitted on the WIPP website at the third blue box labeled “Legacy TRU Waste Disposal Plan.” https://wipp.energy.gov/
Once the comment period ends on January 3, 2025, WIPP must submit the public’s comments to the New Mexico Environment Department for its review about whether to accept the disposal plan or reject it as inadequate because it does not meet the hazardous waste permit requirements.
Sample Letter:
Copy this letter into your email or into a Word document.
Add your own variations if you wish.
or mail it to:
WIPP Information Center
4021 National Parks Highway
Carlsbad, NM 88220
December 2024
Dear New Mexico Environment Department,
I appreciate your efforts to protect New Mexicans in the current WIPP Hazardous Waste Permit agreement of 2023. On Nov 4th the DOE submitted their Legacy Waste Disposal Plan, as required in that permit.
The Plan as submitted by the DOE is clearly inadequate.
In many respects the Plan violates the Permit Agreement, as it does not comply with important provisions in the Permit.
I urge NMED to re-write or require the DOE to rewrite parts of the Plan, so that the following provisions are clearly defined and strictly enforced:
1. Legacy Waste must be defined as having been generated by 1999,
when WIPP opened.
2. Legacy Waste is prioritized, especially LANL Legacy Waste.
3. Provisions must be added to the Plan requiring DOE to support
generator sites in their work to process their Legacy Waste, so it
is ready to be disposed at WIPP, when space is available in panels
11 and 12.
4. Finally the Plan must provide that some waste be disposed in a
repository in another state, so that New Mexico does not bear the
entire burden of disposal of military nuclear waste.
WIPP was sold to New Mexicans as a pilot project, to clean up Cold War waste, as a test case for deep geologic nuclear waste disposal, and to be closed after 25 years of operation. The Legacy Waste Disposal Plan as submitted violates all those promises made to the State and the people of New Mexico.
We are counting on you, our watchdog regulators, to require that the DOE comply with the above four provisions in the Legacy Waste Disposal Plan.
Thanks for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Name
Address
Date
