All eyes on nuclear waste in Carlsbad

Feb 6 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Bruce Krasnow The Santa Fe New Mexican

The Carlsbad community in southeastern New Mexico is admittedly attracted to nuclear waste. When it was virtually the only community in the country willing to host the nation's first nuclear waste repository almost 40 years ago, that interest may have seemed a little desperate.

Now that the federal government has canceled plans for its primary geological repository at Yucca Mountain, and now that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is still the only operating geological repository in the world, WIPP's supporters in Carlsbad are calling their decision a success story and looking at opportunities for taking it to the next level.

Former Rep. John Heaton, a Democrat, who represented Carlsbad for six terms until he lost in the last election, has beaten the drum on behalf of his community's pursuit of nuclear waste for many years.

He has found very few options for economic development for a remote area of the state without an interstate or a major airport.

"We have to make our own way," he said. "All we have is our own natural resources that we have to develop to survive."

What this landscape offers is a high-grade salt bed, hundreds of millions of years old, evaporated from an ancient ocean.

When the U.S. government began looking around in the 1950s for locations to keep radiological waste for thousands of years, they were impressed by the potential of salt deposits for long-term stability. Salt is readily soluble in water, so if it exists in a large deposit over a long period of time, not much water has gotten to it, which contributes to a static environment. Helping create a tight package, the salt itself is fluid enough to flow back into open spaces and seal itself from fractures.

A plot of land was selected outside Carlsbad as a site for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 1989. After a long delay that included much controversy and political wrangling and accommodations to critics and state concerns, WIPP began receiving shipments of defense-related waste, designated as TRU, or transuranic, waste.

"If there is one thing to give the credit, I'd have to say it was the salt," said Bob Forrest, the mayor of Carlsbad during WIPP's formative years, who calls himself a tire salesman. He sells tires and nuclear facilities.

When the president's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future held hearings in New Mexico last week, Forrest told them that the income and revenue from WIPP has been good for Carlsbad.

"We've doubled our reserves," he said. "We set two records last month on gross receipts tax. We have the lowest unemployment of any city in the state and our per capita income is right next to Los Alamos."

As he sees it, the economy, the energy crisis, global warming and "all four wheels coming off at Yucca Mountain" all point to opportunities for southeastern New Mexico.

When WIPP turned 10 last year, Forrest and other Carlsbad boosters looked at Yucca Mountain's political difficulties and started thinking maybe they could take over where the abandoned Nevada project left off.

Pro-nuclear residents of Eddy County are completely on board with the idea of finding a place for just about any type or amount of the country's nuclear waste.

There has been renewed talk of expanding WIPP to take in the defense-related waste that was meant to go to Yucca Mountain. Beyond that, Carlsbad has teamed up with neighboring Lea County to purchase a thousand acres of land that could be used for interim storage of high-level spent fuel from nuclear power plants. All the better, some say, if the temporary holding facility happens to be right next door to the eventual alternative to Yucca Mountain.

"Promise me one thing. If you don't do anything else, just do something because we've got to go one direction or the other," Forrest urged the BRC commissioners. "Don't leave that waste where it's at."

Also weighing on the situation is the fact that WIPP's mandate is tightly bound and regulated by hard-fought national legislation that specifically limits the site's contents and prohibits high-level waste disposal. Not everyone would agree with an expanded scenario.

Speaking to the BRC in Washington, D.C., last year, as well as in a Carlsbad meeting Jan. 27, Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Center, the leading public-interest watchdog on WIPP, argued that continuing uncertainties about the TRU waste inventory and management performance led him to believe it would be a mistake if WIPP were not finished as authorized now, before choosing additional geological disposal sites.

"Right now you can show that WIPP was able to be open for 12 years, that there haven't been accidents or releases at the site or during transportation of the waste," Hancock said at the Carlsbad public meeting. "But in the Gulf of Mexico there were things we've done for a long time and oil companies thought they knew how to drill for oil in deep water. But they had a problem. That's why we need to be able to show that WIPP can do its job."

Susan Gordon, director of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability in Santa Fe, said part of Carlsbad's success was due to the people who had pushed for environmental protection for the people of Carlsbad.

"If it hadn't been for the people pushing for improvements all the way, it could have been a horror show," she said.

An hour east of Carlsbad in Eunice, the Louisiana Energy Company, owned by Netherlands-based Urenco, has recently finished building a uranium enrichment plant, the latest addition in New Mexico's long history of nuclear projects. This involvement, notably in one of the poorest states in the country, also extends from the beginnings of the Manhattan Project in 1943, to two nuclear weapons laboratories, underground nuclear explosion sites in the northeastern corner and extensive uranium deposits and mining operations that are beginning to gear up again.

Contact Roger Snodgrass at roger.sno@gmail.com.