Waste Isolation Pilot Plant

ABOUT

Description and Current Mission

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation’s only deep geologic long-lived radioactive waste repository. Located 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, WIPP permanently isolates defense-generated transuranic (TRU) waste 2,150 feet underground in an ancient salt formation.

WIPP was constructed for disposal of defense-generated TRU waste from DOE sites around the country. TRU waste consists of clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil and other items contaminated with small amounts of plutonium and other man-made radioactive elements. The waste is permanently disposed of in rooms mined in an underground salt bed layer over 2000 feet from the surface.

TRU waste began accumulating in the 1940s with the beginning of the nation’s nuclear defense program. As early as the 1950s, the National Academy of Sciences recommended deep disposal of long-lived TRU radioactive wastes in geologically stable formations, such as deep salt beds.

Sound environmental practices and strict regulations require such wastes to be isolated to protect human health and the environment.

Bedded salt is free of fresh flowing water, easily mined, impermeable and geologically stable — an ideal medium for permanently isolating long-lived radioactive wastes from the environment. However, its most important quality in this application is the way salt rock seals all fractures and naturally closes all openings.

History of WIPP

Throughout the 1960s, government scientists searched for an appropriate site for radioactive waste disposal, eventually testing a remote desert area of southeastern New Mexico where, 250 million years earlier, evaporation cycles of the ancient Permian Sea had left a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed.

In 1979, Congress authorized WIPP, and the facility was constructed during the 1980s. Congress limited WIPP to the disposal of defense-generated TRU wastes in the 1992 Land Withdrawal Act. In 1998, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency certified WIPP for safe, long-term disposal of TRU wastes.

On March 26, 1999, the first waste shipment arrived at WIPP from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

WIPP’s disposal rooms are nearly a half mile below the surface (2,150 feet). By comparison, the Empire State Building is only 1,454 feet high.

Browse this page to keep updated on NukeWatch and other local community groups efforts to STOP FOREVER WIPP

STAY INFORMED:

Stay Informed of All Permit-Related Happenings at WIPP! Sign Up for Updates:

The New Mexico Environment Department maintains a Facility Mailing List to which you can add your name and address to get the latest information – just email Ricardo Maestas at the New Mexico Environment Department at [email protected] and ask to be added to the list.  Or mail your request with your mailing address to:

Ricardo Maestas

New Mexico Environment Department-Hazardous Waste Bureau

2905 Rodeo Park East, Bldg. 1

Santa Fe, NM 87505

WIPP also uses the facility mailing list to inform you about opportunities to provide public comments.  NMED provides their list to WIPP.

More Info and signup options:

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WIPP Updates

Environment Department Negotiates Settlement Agreement For Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Renewal Permit

“Communities in New Mexico and around the U.S. benefit from the clean-up of legacy waste and its disposal at WIPP,” said NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney. “The new permit conditions affirm New Mexico’s authority and position that all roads lead from WIPP – we are no longer the last stop for clean-up but the driving force in that process that begins here.”

LOS ALMOS REPORTER | July 2, 2023 losalamosreporter.com

New Mexico Environment Departement NEWS RELEASE

The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Salado Isolation Mining Contractors LLC (SIMCO), successfully negotiated a settlement agreement last week with multiple parties that invited a hearing and that opposed the draft 10-year renewal permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) located in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

The agreement includes modified conditions that provide greater regulatory oversight, improve safeguards, and authorize disposal of waste in two new underground panels over the next ten-year permit term. The modified conditions also prioritize legacy waste from cleanup activities, including from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Nuclear Waste Storage in New Mexico Angers State, Cheers Locals – Bloomberg News

America’s Nuclear Waste Capital Wants More of It, Against State Wishes
Burying the country’s nuclear weapons waste brought an economic lifeline to Carlsbad, New Mexico. State leaders worry it’s become a dumping ground.

By BLOOMBERG NEWS | May 2, 2023 bloomberg.com

At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico, much of the activity is underground. 
Photographer: Daniel Moore/Bloomberg

A half-mile underground beneath a windswept field in the southeast corner of New Mexico, hundreds of workers haul drums of radioactive waste into a salt mine that will entomb them for at least 10,000 years.

Up on the surface, federal officials overseeing the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) are working harder than ever to smooth over tensions with state officials and skeptics in the state capital so the facility can meet its mission: cleaning up the country’s nuclear weapons production sites.

‘Stop making nuclear weapons’: Activists press federal chief on LANL pit push

“We live in the third-most impoverished state in the nation, and yet we’re throwing away money to build weapons of war rather than take care of our own people…The U.S. must be the one to end the nuclear arms race because only then will other nations follow,” – Rikki Farrell of the ANSWER coalition

Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said new pits will be used to equip two new warheads being developed. He asked whether these new designs could lead to a return to explosive nuclear testing underground.

SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | April 5, 2023 santafenewmexican.com

040423 jw lanl meeting3.jpg
Anti-nuclear weapons demonstrator Bobbe Besold watches Tuesday as a panel of representatives from Los Alamos National Laboratory answers questions at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. The lab has been tasked with increasing its production of plutonium pits for weapons to 30 per year by 2026.

Anti-nuclear advocates showed up in force Tuesday to grill the head of the federal nuclear security agency at a town hall about plans to have Los Alamos National Laboratory make 30 plutonium pits for warheads a year, a pursuit that has generated heated controversy in Northern New Mexico since its inception.

A standing-room-only crowd filled the meeting room at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, plus about 200 people attended remotely, almost all of them opponents of the lab producing the bomb core triggers, or pits, that the president, military leaders and other federal officials say are necessary for global nuclear deterrence.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department branch, wants the lab to produce 30 pits yearly by 2026 and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make an additional 50 pits by the mid-2030s.

Agency Administrator Jill Hruby repeated what has become a familiar refrain among defense and nuclear officials — the aging arsenal must be modernized and new pits are required because no significant quantity has been produced since the Rocky Flats facility in Colorado shut down in 1989.

Nuke waste rules proposed for Carlsbad-area site critiqued by watchdogs, local leaders

“We are opposed to the idea of continuing to expand the WIPP underground…Back when this got started, everyone agreed it would take 25 years and all the waste would be emplaced…That’s not going to happen by 2024.

That’s not the citizens of New Mexico’s fault or NMED’s fault. It’s on the DOE. They don’t want an end date. That’s something we need to push on.” — Nuclear Waste Program Director Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center

By  | January 6, 2023 news.yahoo.com

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant operates under a permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), which is renewed every 10 years.

That process is ongoing for WIPP, and NMED added several provisions in a draft permit released last month that called for a stricter accounting of waste coming to WIPP each year, required updates on the process of finding a new repository and demanded a greater priority be placed on disposal of nuclear waste generated in New Mexico.

Feds push plan to dispose plutonium using nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad

“We want an end to the situation where New Mexico is the only nuclear waste dump for all 50 states. The concern is that if you increase the number of shipments, the number of years, and you increase the dangerousness of the waste, at some point, somewhere an accident is inevitable.” – Cindy Weehler, co-chair of Santa Fe-based activist group 285 ALL

By Adrian Hedden Carlsbad Current-Argus | January 5, 2023 currentargus.com

Federal nuclear waste managers said they planned to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapons-grade plutonium at a nuclear repository in New Mexico after the waste is diluted to a lower level of radioactivity.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) proposed in 2020 a “dilute and dispose” method of eliminating the plutonium from the environment, ultimately via emplacement at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant repository near Carlsbad.

Before that can happen, the NNSA said the waste can be “downblended” to meet requirements at WIPP, which is designed to dispose of transuranic (TRU) waste that can only be of a certain level of radioactivity.

Albuquerque Journal Editorial: NM right to ask for accounting of nuclear waste

“I think there’s this mentality that New Mexico can just be the forever home for all the nation’s waste. It’s an exploitative mentality regarding our state.” — Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces

BY ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL EDITORIAL BOARD | January 4, 2023 abqjournal.com

It is more than fair, when you house a radioactive waste facility like the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, to ask how much waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons program still needs a home.

Especially when the nation keeps making more.

In the proposed permit for the federal government to continue storing nuclear waste at WIPP in southeastern New Mexico, the New Mexico Environment Department is seeking a full accounting from the U.S. Energy Department of materials still needing to be cleaned up and shipped to WIPP from laboratories and defense-related sites around the country. It also suggests developing another storage site (Hint: How about the $13.5 billion already spent on Yucca Mountain?). And it puts Congress — the same Congress that just approved spending more to make key plutonium components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal, which will also make more radioactive waste — on notice that if lawmakers expand the type of waste accepted at WIPP, the permit will be revoked.

New Mexico Presses US to Develop Other Nuclear Waste Sites

State wants full waste inventory, limits to disposal
WIPP, open since 1999, mining new panels

 | December 20, 2022 news.bloomberglaw.com

New Mexico will be “unwavering” in sticking to proposed new conditions on a federal underground nuclear waste repository, a state official said, including one that revokes the facility’s permit should Congress expand its disposal limit.

The state is demanding the Energy Department and its site contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, furnish an accurate inventory of all remaining wastes awaiting clean-up and emplacement at the site and an annual report detailing the agency’s progress toward siting another repository in another state.

Fallout from a nuclear past: A new book explores the human toll of “nuclear colonization” in New Mexico

Of the three waves of colonization New Mexico has undergone — Spanish, American and nuclear — the latter is the least explored. And for author Myrriah Gómez, there were personal reasons to reveal the truth about how “nuclear colonization” has altered the state’s past and continues to shape its future.

By Alicia Inez Guzmán Searchlight New Mexico | December 2022 searchlightnm.org

Gómez, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, is the author of  “Nuclear Nuevo México,” a book that explores the history of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the fundamental tension of living in its shadow. Its publication this month by the University of Arizona Press couldn’t be timelier: Los Alamos is currently preparing to build plutonium “pits” that act as triggers in nuclear weapons, putting the lab front and center in an ongoing national debate about nuclear impacts.

“If Spanish colonialism brought Spanish colonizers and U.S. colonialism brought American colonizers,” as Gómez writes in her book, “then nuclear colonialism brought nuclear colonizers, scientists, military personnel, atomic bomb testing, and nuclear waste among them.”

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Nuclear waste permit ‘more stringent’ New Mexico says as feds look to renew for 10 years

NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said the State wanted a permit with stronger regulations moving forward, to better protect people and the environment from the impacts of nuclear waste disposal.

“It will be more stringent, full stop,” Kenney said. “The conditions were adding to it are designed to add more accountability to the whole complex that are sending waste to WIPP.”

By Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus | December 10, 2022 currentargus.com

Tougher rules for a nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad could be on the way as New Mexico officials sought “more stringent” regulations as the federal government sought to renew its permit with the state for the facility.

The State sought new requirements to prioritize nuclear waste from within New Mexico for disposal, called for an accounting of all of the waste planned for disposal in the next decade and regular updates on federal efforts to find the location for a new repository as conditions of the permit.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy which holds a permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) that must be updated every 10 years.

The facility sees transuranic (TRU) nuclear waste from DOE facilities around the country disposed of via burial in an underground salt formation about 2,000 feet beneath the surface.

Expanded WIPP mission? No shortcuts

“This “bait and switch” tactic, where WIPP is marketed with one mission in mind, then greatly expanded decades later, contradicts DOE’s professed dedication to a consent-based process that, in their own words, “focuses on the needs and concerns of people and communities.”

This expansion represents such a dramatic change in WIPP’s core mission that its managers must reassess safety issues and negotiate a new social contract with the public before moving forward.”

, By Dennis McQuillan and Rodney Ewing | October 29, 2022 santafenewmexican.com

Expanded WIPP mission? No shortcutsThe U.S. Department of Energy proposes a dramatic expansion of the type and amount of radioactive waste for burial at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In March, community groups rallied outside the state Capitol protesting this planned expansion, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sent the Department of Energy a letter in April that cited “ongoing frustration among New Mexicans regarding the lack of meaningful and transparent public engagement from the DOE on waste clean-up, shipments, and long-term plans for the WIPP.”

While it may seem too late to protest a facility that has operated for decades, citizen activists are right to object, and the governor is right to demand the Department of Energy address the concerns of state citizens.

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STOP FOREVER WIPP! Specific News to WIPP Closing Plans

WIPP: Judge upholds change in how nuke waste is counted. Could keep site open to 2050

“We know it’s part of expanding WIPP. We know what DOE is doing but DOE doesn’t want to publicly admit it and the Environment Department doesn’t want to deal with it…The reason the laws have always put limits on WIPP is that the DOE was supposed to be finding locations for other repositories. There is no other repository and that’s why they don’t want to have a limit on what goes into WIPP.” — Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at Southwest Research and Information Center.

Adrian Hedden Carlsbad Current-Argus November 15, 2021 currentargus.com

A New Mexico appellate judge upheld a change in how the volume of nuclear waste disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is counted, shifting the repository from being halfway to capacity to only a third full.

In 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy requested to modify its WIPP operating permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) to change how it counts the amount of waste toward the facility’s statutory limit of 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic (TRU) waste consisting of clothing materials and equipment irradiated during nuclear activities.

The change was intended to count the inner volume of the waste as opposed to the volume of the outer containers that hold the waste, seeking to avoid counting air between the waste itself and waste drums.

NMED approved the permit modification request (PMR) in 2019, but Albuquerque-based watchdog groups Southwest Research and Information Center and Nuclear Watch New Mexico immediately appealed the decision.

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Energy Department to spend $15.5M to upgrade route from Los Alamos lab to waste site [WIPP]

“Essentially blessing what DOE was going to have to do anyway in order to expand nuclear weapons activities and waste disposal,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “And once again demonstrated the subservience of our state government to the nuclear weapons industry here in New Mexico.”

By Scott Wyland [email protected] Santa Fe New Mexican December 6, 2021 santafenewmexican.com

The N.M. 4 and East Jemez Road intersection in the far northwestern corner of Santa Fe County will be improved as part of a $15.5 million upgrade of routes on which Los Alamos National Laboratory transports nuclear waste to an underground disposal site in Southern New Mexico.

The U.S. Energy Department will spend $3.5 million to improve the intersection, which lies just outside Los Alamos County, and another $12 million to upgrade routes it owns and uses mostly to ship transuranic waste — contaminated gloves, clothing, equipment, soil and other items — to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.

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Video Presentation on WIPP Expansion – February 5, 2022

Resources & Media

National Academy of Scientists Report

Review of the Department of Energy’s Plans for Disposal of Surplus Plutonium in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant 2020

Action Alerts

Stay Informed of All Permit-Related Happenings at WIPP! Sign Up for Updates:

The New Mexico Environment Department maintains a Facility Mailing List to which you can add your name and address to get the latest information – just email Ricardo Maestas at the New Mexico Environment Department at [email protected] and ask to be added to the list.  Or mail your request with your mailing address to:

Ricardo Maestas

New Mexico Environment Department-Hazardous Waste Bureau

2905 Rodeo Park East, Bldg. 1

Santa Fe, NM 87505

WIPP also uses the facility mailing list to inform you about opportunities to provide public comments.  NMED provides their list to WIPP.

More Info and signup options:

Continue reading

HELP US SUPPORT NEW MEXICO’S GOVERNOR IN ACTING TO STOP WIPP EXPANSION!

STOP “FOREVER WIPP!”

The Department of Energy is seeking to modify the nuclear waste permit for southeastern New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Dragging out WIPP’s operations decades past the original 20-year agreement violates the social contract made with New Mexicans. WIPP is being equipped to take the waste that will be generated from production of plutonium pits for nuclear warheads, and it was never supposed to do that. An expansion of WIPP will impact the entire country, not just residents of southeastern New Mexico.

View the videos below for more information, and, if you live in an area that may be endangered by these nuclear waste transportation risks, please consider making your own “This is My Neighborhood” video!

Background Information – Problems with Nuclear Waste
Playlist: Problems with Nuclear Waste


Mixed Waste Landfill Facts

Mixed Waste Landfill Facts

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Quotes

There are two problems for our species’ survival – nuclear war and environmental catastrophe – and we’re hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
– Noam Chomsky

 

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