A nuclear-waste disposal site in New Mexico closed in February after a radiation leak forced an evacuation.
Yet residents near the site want it reopened.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz promised Monday he would get the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad up and running again, the Associated Press reported. Community members welcomed Moniz and voiced their support despite potential danger.
Investigations into the accident at WIPP uncovered a culture of unsafe practices at the site, including a history of irregular inspections. Days before the contamination at WIPP, a 29-year-old truck caught fire underground at the site. Ted Wyka, an Energy Department official leading the investigation, called the accident “preventable.”
So why does Carlsbad want nuclear waste? Because it’s worth big money.
Through WIPP — which accepts only low-level radioactive waste such as gloves and tools from nuclear research — more than a thousand jobs were created for the town. According to the Alamogordo News, its annual budget is more than $200 million, which mostly covers wages. Still, that’s just a fraction of what the U.S. Energy Department has dumped into the facility.
The site cost about $2.5 billion to open, and the federal government has spent more than $6 billion on WIPP since its inception, the Albuquerque Journal reported in June. Filling the site will cost tens of billions more. And that spells job security for Carlsbad workers.
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There’s no shortage of nuclear waste to spur such dreams. In 2011, the United States had nearly 72,000 tons of the radioactive junk but few places to put it, the Associated Press reported.
Finding new places to dump waste has proved difficult because parsing out how to store it properly takes a long time. So the waste sits on sites where it is created.
Loving and Carlsbad aside, not everyone wants a dump — the preferred term is a “repository” — nearby. A lot of Nevadans were happy to see the Obama administration pull the plug on a dump site for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain.
After all, waste can remain radioactive for a quarter of a billion years. Officials can’t be sure what happens to it — or how to warn visitors away.
Read more at Why small towns want nuclear waste dumps
