A highway project by the state proposes to temporarily change the route of loaded trucks traveling from the north to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
The planned road reconstruction, still a month from being voted on by the New Mexico Transportation Commission, has cast renewed attention on WIPP. But that project is nothing compared to the ideas of Carlsbad-area politicians, who want to build their region's employment base by establishing even deeper ties to the nuclear-disposal industry.
"WIPP is one of the greatest unsung success stories around, a project with a perfect safety record and more of a game changer for our economy than even oil and gas," said Eddy County Commissioner Jack Volpato, a Republican. "I see it or maybe something else like it creating a whole new generation of jobs."
In particular, Volpato said, Carlsbad and Eddy County will push for a federal study to determine if a second repository similar to WIPP could safely bury high-level nuclear waste from defense projects.
Such an endeavor would maintain or add well-paying jobs in the Carlsbad area. It also would solve an environmental problem for the country, Volpato said.
The idea of taking nuclear waste from the rest of America and salting it away under the desert is not radical
thinking in Carlsbad, which has been a neighbor to WIPP since 1999. For many people, nuclear-waste disposal is pure business now, not a cause for worry."I was a skeptic when WIPP came here. Then I educated myself and I have become entirely comfortable with it," Volpato said.
The county commissioners and the Carlsbad City Council recently voted to hire a Washington lobbying firm at a cost of $15,000 a month to pursue more business opportunities in radioactive disposal, said City Administrator Jon Tully. Two commissioners and two council members dissented, but the area is moving ahead to market itself as a safe place to deposit nuclear waste. Tully said the duties of the lobbying company, the C2 Group, would be narrowly focused on nuclear research and projects that could create jobs for Carlsbad. These could include interim storage of certain wastes, expansion of WIPP's mission in burying transuranic waste and perhaps other undertakings to help in nuclear clean-ups. Under the federal law that created WIPP, the repository can only accept transuranic waste from government sites that had a defense mission. These included operations in eight states, notably Los Alamos in New Mexico, Rocky Flats in Colorado and the Savannah River site in South Carolina. Last year, U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce introduced a bill to expand WIPP's mission, saying about 200 good jobs would be in jeopardy if nothing was changed. Pearce proposed that WIPP be allowed to accept government-owned transuranic waste not related to defense missions. One example of this is the West Valley site south of Buffalo, N.Y. It was a commercial venture used as a nuclear fuel reprocessing center.
Just like the ongoing shipments from defense sites, this waste could be trucked to WIPP and deposited in ancient salt beds 2,150 feet below the earth's surface.
Volpato said such concepts for sustaining WIPP while cleaning up environmental messes remain possible. But the area's lobbying effort also could seek other types of business, perhaps eventually the high-level nuclear waste from defense operations.
"People seem to have heard of Yucca Mountain but not about us," Volpato said of the defunded Nevada repository.
The oncoming nuclear campaign by Carlsbad and Eddy County probably will re-ignite opponents of WIPP, Volpato said. His bet is that most people can be won over, provided that the scientific research shows a new nuclear mission can be handled as safely and efficiently as WIPP has been. As for the state highway project, Tully said city officials still had questions about the plan but expect to resolve them in meetings with the New Mexico Department of Transportation.
Gary Shubert, the engineer for NMDOT's division in southeastern New Mexico, said the state needs to improve the base of New Mexico 200, a designated WIPP route. Shubert described it as a two-lane road with the peaks and valleys of a roller coaster.
The state proposes to close a portion of it next year. That means an estimated 560 transuranic waste shipments to WIPP would take an alternate route in the Carlsbad area.
Trucks would depart from U.S. 285 southbound at New Mexico 524. Then they would go east to Canyon Street before continuing onto U.S. 62/180. Shubert said this route is about a half-mile longer than the existing path to WIPP.
Milan Simonich, Santa Fe Bureau chief of Texas-New Mexico Newspapers, can be reached at msimonich@tnmnp.com or 505-820-6898. His blog is at nmcapitolreport.com
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