Bill Tallen

My interest in things nuclear started in the late 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at the University of New Mexico, a state that was, and remains, a "hotbed" of nuclear development (pun intended), with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the Trinity Site where the first nuclear explosive device was detonated in 1945.  

I later worked for 20 years for the U.S. Department of Energy as a fed, and 10 more years as a contractor, in the belly of the beast.

The first, and so far the only, permanent nuclear waste repository in the U.S. is the Department of Energy’s WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, authorized by Congress in 1979, opened for business in 1999. 

WIPP is licensed to accept only “low level” radioactive waste from the government’s nuclear weapons program; basically, trash of all varieties contaminated by plutonium or other transuranic wastes, including a witch’s brew of toxic chemicals just to round out the hazards picture.  

The waste is held 2,000 feet below the surface in a massive natural salt bed which, it is hoped, will eventually encapsulate the drums and hold them isolated and safe for the 10,000 years necessary for the radiation to decay to something approaching safe levels. There’s an old saying, “hope is not a strategy,” but it’s all we have because we’ve only monitored radioactive waste, or the fluid dynamics of subterranean salt beds, or the integrity of steel drums packed full of a mix of radioactive and corrosive chemical compounds, for 50 or 60 years at most. 

Already, though, there and elsewhere, we’ve seen mishaps that are less about science than they are about human behavior. The DOE, in the WIPP design process, was confident there was no ‘significant’ risk of radioactive materials leaking to the surface, so they designed a ventilation system that allowed human workers to breathe in the depths of the facility, but not one that would filter any of the exhaust effluent that came back to the surface. 

This worked fine until 2014, when up the road in Los Alamos, contractors trying to meet an arbitrary deadline for a monetary bonus cut some corners. They added a scientifically formulated moisture absorbent (aka kitty litter) into drums full of waste, before sealing them for transport to WIPP. But someone had bought the kitty litter with organic ingredients versus the approved minerals-only formula. Supervisors at both LANL and WIPP ignored reports of smoke and orange foam leaking from some of the drums, but hey, a bonus is a bonus. It turned out that hundreds of drums had been packed this way. According to the scathing accident reports, one or more barrels of plutonium-contaminated waste overheated, outgassed, and exploded in one of the underground WIPP waste storage galleries. The entire gallery — where technicians regularly worked — was contaminated, as were 22 workers on the service when the ventilation system exhausted air contaminated with radioactive materials.

WIPP was shut down for three years, and the cleanup cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Then — and this will be on the test, as it’s pertinent to Wyoming’s future — the DOE reneged on all its prior permits and agreements with the state of New Mexico, essentially demanding and receiving an extension of the operational life of WIPP from 2024 until the 2080s, plus authorization to add even more categories and a significantly greater volume of radioactive waste to what WIPP had been designed and licensed to receive. WIPP is back in business now, and business is good. For the government.

And yes, WIPP receives only government-generated radioactive waste from all the labs and plants involved in the nuclear weapons program from 65 years ago into the future. It doesn’t accept the highly radioactive, chemically toxic spent fuel from commercial power plants, which is what industry wants to place into ‘forever’ storage, on the surface, in concrete casks, in Wyoming. The same Department of Energy is providing testing and assurance for all the West Coast nuclear start-ups, like Radiant Industries in Bar Nunn and Bill Gates’ TerraPower in Kemmerer, who are eager to site their experimental facilities in Wyoming. And the DOE’s sister agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has regulatory authority over all these private-sector nuclear projects — and a big revolving door between them and the industry. Foxes guard the chicken coop. 

We have legislators — if you can believe it — who travel to demonstrations and presentations by these agencies and companies and come home singing their praises, and buying the reassurances of all these people who seek their fortunes, or justify their government jobs, with unproven technical concepts and flawed business plans. 

All this is just a preface to my argument that Wyoming needs to be very skeptical of the rush to unproven nuclear technologies.  To be continued.