The Reporter's Notebook, Ep. 24: Nuclear Waste
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at sunrise. (Courtesy photo / U.S. Department of Energy)
This week, we’re talking about nuclear waste. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of news on this front, most of which is coming out of southeast New Mexico. The region has a long history with nuclear waste — dating back to the mid-1970s, when the area was first selected to be the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. There were bumps in the road along the way — lots of them, in fact. And it wasn’t until 1999 that WIPP received its first actual shipment of nuclear waste.
Now, new talks are underway about a second storage facility in the area — the consolidated interim storage facility. The proposed storage facility in New Mexico would ultimately have a capacity to hold up to 100,000 metric tons of spent nuclear at the surface in southeast New Mexico. One New Jersey-based company intends to transport its waste about 1,400 miles to the facility.
Additionally, New Mexico State University recently received millions of dollars in federal Department of Energy grants to explore the possibility of recycling nuclear waste.
We talk to reporter Adrian Hedden, the energy reporter from the Carlsbad Current-Argus — who frequently writes about nuclear waste — about big changes afoot for southeast New Mexico, which appears poised to become the nuclear storage capital of the world.
This podcast was originally published by the Las Cruces Sun-News.
