Waste Hugger

By Tania Soussan

Radioactive waste isn't something most communities want in their backyards. Carlsbad, New Mexico, is an exception.

This small town of about 27,000 people in the southeastern New Mexico desert is unabashedly nuclear friendly. Many of its residents work at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground repository for materials contaminated with plutonium from the nation's nuclear weapons program, and more nuclear facilities could be on the horizon.

Community leaders say Carlsbad has benefitted in many ways from the presence of the WIPP storage site over the last 15 years. The city now boasts the second-highest median household income in the state: $52,086. The region's economy is diversified, stable, and robust. Roads and schools have been improved. And the influx of scientists has provided a reservoir of knowledge.

In fact, WIPP contributes almost 3,000 direct and indirect jobs and nearly $400 million a year to the region's economy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy's Carlsbad Field Office.

"It's been fantastic," says David W. Rogers, the minister at First Christian Church and a professor of communications and history at the Carlsbad campus of New Mexico State University. Rogers and others say Carlsbad and the nation would benefit if more waste, including the hotter spent fuel from nuclear power reactors, was stored here.

"We're willing to accept even a higher level of waste," says former city planning director Stephanie Shumsky, AICP.

"We have a region of the state that feels very secure with nuclear programs," adds John A. Heaton, chairman of the Carlsbad Mayor's Nuclear Task Force and a former state representative. "We think it could be very stimulating to the economy as well as provide a service to the country," he says, echoing Shumsky's view.

With Yucca Mountain, the federal government's Plan A for high-level nuclear waste disposal, facing an uncertain future, the country needs a new place to send the 70,000 tons of spent fuel from 50 years of nuclear power plant operations. That waste — enough to cover a football field seven yards deep — is now sitting in dry casks or in pools at the nation's 100 nuclear reactors.

Carlsbad is vying to become Plan B. The region has two things going for it: a population willing to accept radioactive waste and geology that many argue is particularly well-suited for safe storage.

Early days

Discussions about burying radioactive waste in the 250-million-year-old salt beds that sit almost half a mile below the desert started in Carlsbad as early as 1975. A lengthy public education process — with information coming straight from scientists and from trusted local leaders — made the difference in winning the community's acceptance.

"Folks in town were as skeptical as anybody could be," Heaton says. "It took time for people to get it, to understand and be confident." Today, people on the street are likely "to know quite a bit about radiation and about isotopes," he says. "They can sling the lingo, if you will."

The education and outreach campaign is the reason WIPP has been accepted, says John P. Waters, executive director of the nonprofit Carlsbad Department of Development. "We learned the lesson that Yucca has not," he adds.

The creation of an independent monitoring center run by New Mexico State University also helped to raise confidence. The Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring & Research Center keeps tabs on radiation in the air, water, soil, and even people of the region. Residents who volunteer for the "Lie Down and Be Counted" program receive free scans that tell them just how much radiation their bodies contain.

Some of that public confidence was shaken in February, however, when a salt-hauling truck caught fire underground at WIPP, followed days later by an unrelated radiation leak — the first in 15 years of operation. The accidents and the response left some mixed feelings and a hint of skepticism in the community, according to Shumsky. "That really shook people up," she says.

The problems, which a Department of Energy investigation blamed in part on slackened safety programs, also have reignited a national dialogue about radioactive waste disposal.

At WIPP, more than 90,000 cubic meters of relatively low-level transuranic waste such as clothing, tools, and rags contaminated with small amounts of radioactive elements, mostly plutonium, already have been placed in 300-foot-long rooms carved in the salt beds. The salt has self-healing properties and, over time, will fill in the mined areas and seal in the waste canisters.

WIPP is restricted by law to defense-related transuranic waste, but some argue that the salt deposits are the best option for high-level radioactive waste storage — including the byproducts of nuclear power generation — because of the salt's unique properties, the absence of flowing groundwater, and the region's stable geology.

National dilemma

Yucca Mountain, a volcanic tuff formation roughly 100 miles from Las Vegas, was for years the federal government's only solution for permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. More than $10 billion has been spent to research and develop the site. But Nevada and its senior congressman, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, have fought it.

In 2010, President Barack Obama halted work on Yucca Mountain, but the project isn't completely dead. A federal court of appeals has since ruled that the president overstepped his authority and ordered the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to finish its work on a permit application for the possible repository. However, there's no money for the hearings necessary to complete the review, says NRC spokeswoman Maureen Conley.

The Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, created by Obama to map out a new, long-term strategy for dealing with used fuel and high-level radioactive waste, did not rule out Yucca Mountain but recommended a new consent-based approach to locating future nuclear waste repositories, the creation of a new organization to deal with the issue, and prompt efforts to develop permanent geologic disposal and interim storage facilities.

"We believe it is long past time for the government to make good on its commitments to the American people to provide for the safe disposal of nuclear waste," the commission members wrote in their 2013 report. "This generation has an obligation to avoid burdening future generations with finding a safe permanent solution for nuclear wastes they had no part in creating, while also preserving their energy options."

The administration last year set goals to have a pilot storage facility open by 2021, with an initial focus on accepting used nuclear fuel from shut-down reactor sites; a larger interim storage facility available by 2025; and a permanent geologic repository by 2048.

Neither the blue ribbon commission nor the administration suggested any specific sites. A bipartisan group of four senators, including Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, in June 2013 introduced legislation to create a new Nuclear Waste Administration responsible for providing an interim facility to consolidate the storage of spent fuel and high-level radioactive waste and for locating, building, and operating a permanent repository.

The question of what to do with nuclear power plant waste is an important priority of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but the legislation is unlikely to come up before the 2014 midterm election, a committee staffer says.

The costs of inaction are mounting. The DOE has a contractual obligation to begin taking possession of spent fuel from reactors and safely disposing of it beginning in 1998. Because it failed to live up to that promise, utilities have successfully sued the agency to recover their costs for storing spent fuel at the reactor sites. Already, the bill to taxpayers is in the billions; DOE secretary Ernest Moniz has said the price could hit $23 billion over the next 50 years.

European countries are facing similar challenges. Finland and Sweden are working on geologic repositories. France, which gets most of its electricity from nuclear power, reprocesses used fuel and is investigating a geologic repository.

Until the 1980s, U.S. nuclear power plants stored all their used fuel in steel- and concrete-lined pools of water, which acts as a natural radiation barrier. But as space in those pools ran short, the plants started moving some waste into massive, airtight canisters called dry casks. Today, some 71,000 metric tons is stored in casks and pools at reactor sites across the country, with 2,000 metric tons added every year at an annual cost of $5 million to $7 million.

"It's very inefficient," says Rod McCullum, director of used fuel programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group. The institute supports the idea of consolidating waste from reactor sites into an interim storage facility, but "geological disposal is the ultimate answer because we don't want to make this an intergenerational issue," McCullum says.

Permanent repositories could be safely operated in salt beds or hard rock geology at a variety of locations around the country, he adds. "They all have their pros and cons," he says. "It's not what happens in the ground. It's what happens above the ground that determines where the repository is. The politicians live above the ground."

Looking forward

Carlsbad community leaders hope that politicians will favor their quest to expand the region's nuclear industry.

"I would love to see commercial nuclear waste in the WIPP site," Rogers says. "I've read the science and I'm convinced WIPP is the best place for it to be."

Heaton, Waters, and others agree. "Rural areas have to be very creative and innovative," Heaton says. "You find niches in the business world and you try to take advantage of those." The nuclear industry could be that profitable new niche for Carlsbad, he says.

In addition to WIPP, the southeastern corner of New Mexico is home to Urenco USA's uranium enrichment plant, and International Isotopes Inc. is working on a depleted uranium deconversion and fluorine extraction processing facility. Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists operates a low-level radioactive waste depository for such things as contaminated tools and protective clothing from nuclear power plants just over the border in Andrews County, Texas.

"We've been billing ourselves as a nuclear corridor for some time," says Russell Hardy, director of the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring & Research Center.

On the drawing board in the Carlsbad region are proposals for new research and an expanded mission at WIPP, a small modular nuclear reactor to add to the area's electricity supply, and an independent interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel from power plants across the country.

WIPP already has offered many lessons for scientists and politicians. It has shown that salt works well to isolate transuranic waste, has demonstrated handling and emplacement methods that could be applied to other types of wastes, and has highlighted the need for a good relationship between stakeholders and regulators, according to a DOE official.

New thermal research planned for the 2015 fiscal year could give scientists and policy makers even more information about how salt reacts to higher level waste such as that from nuclear power reactors. Unlike the transuranic waste now stored at WIPP, that higher-level waste generates heat.

The cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs, along with Lea and Eddy Counties, have formed the Eddy Lea Energy Alliance LLC, or ELEA, and purchased 1,000 acres of land north of WIPP. The alliance believes its site would make a perfect interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel or other high-level waste. Dry casks with multiple layers of security would be placed on the surface or just below ground in a concrete vault, Heaton says.

Establishing such a facility would require a public outreach and consent process, state approval, and a license from the NRC, he adds.

Not a sure thing

Not everyone in New Mexico is as bullish on nuclear waste as the folks in Carlsbad. Don Hancock, director of the Nuclear Waste Safety Program at the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, has for decades been an outspoken critic of WIPP and a steadfast opponent of expanded radioactive waste storage in New Mexico.

He calls the idea of interim storage "dumb" and says moving spent fuel actually expands the problem to additional sites, is costly, and requires transporting the waste, which could be dangerous. "It can and should stay at the power plant sites for some number of decades," Hancock says. Expanding WIPP also is a bad idea, and one that the people of New Mexico have rejected for 35 years, he says, adding that Congress and the state of New Mexico have repeatedly limited WIPP to the storage of defense-related transuranic waste.

The state of New Mexico supports the current mission of WIPP, believing it plays an important role, but any possibility of future expansion is up in the air. "The New Mexico Environment Department is currently not moving forward on any future plans for an expanded mission for WIPP until the cause of the February 14 radiological event is determined and necessary corrective actions are taken," says spokesman Jim Winchester.

The Department of Energy has not discussed with the state the prospect of storing other kinds of waste at WIPP, a DOE official says.

Lone Star grab?

Carlsbad could face some competition in its bid for more nuclear business. Just over the border in Texas, folks in Loving County — population 95 — also hope to attract an interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel from the state's four reactors, and possibly from reactors in other states.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality studied the issue, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry this spring asked state legislators to look into establishing a place to store the state's high-level radioactive waste.

If Carlsbad succeeds, it will face new planning challenges. An interim storage facility at the ELEA site could bring 150 or more jobs to an area that already is booming. Thanks to the oil and gas industry — along with potash mining (for fertilizer), agriculture, tourism, and WIPP — unemployment in the area is only about three percent.

The real estate market is tight, and hotel rooms are at a premium because workers who can't find permanent housing are spending weeks or months in hotels. City water use data show that the semipermanent population of workers pushes the city's population up by thousands, Waters says. Even food shopping can be a challenge. Shumsky found Taco Bell out of tortillas, cheese, and beans one evening, and she made a point of hitting Walmart on Monday night after the shelves have been stocked.

Placing more pressure on housing and restaurant and retail services, new nuclear facilities could affect transportation, too. Spent fuel containers, which can weigh 250,000 pounds, would arrive at an interim storage facility by rail. The Carlsbad region already has a good rail network because of the potash industry and would need only to add a short spur, but there is a shortage of rail cars, Heaton and Waters say.

And there could be an indirect impact on road traffic. As part of the agreement between New Mexico and the federal government, the state transportation department received $20 million a year for 15 years to improve highways to safely carry the WIPP shipments. Relief routes were built to divert the waste trucks from traveling through Carlsbad and through the center of Santa Fe in the northern part of the state.

In Carlsbad, the area within that bypass road is now a prime growth area for the city, and new industrial businesses are springing up there. ELEA's proposed interim storage site also could be accessed via the bypass road.

"That relief route has had an impact on how we've planned for Carlsbad and the growth of Carlsbad," Shumsky says.

She adds that planners in communities considering nuclear waste storage facilities should focus on the big picture. "We're trained to look at water systems, air systems, how they work together," she says. "That might be a piece that could be overlooked by the compartmentalization of the science behind it or the politics. Planners are trained to look at all of it together and at the interconnections."

Tania Soussan is a freelance writer specializing in environmental issues. She is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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Resources

Images: Top — WIPP's waste disposal rooms are mined into the region's 2,000-foot-thick underground salt formations, which are well-suited for safe nuclear waste storage. Image and photo courtesy of cbfo.doe.gov . Middle — Containers of low-level transuranic waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons program are stored nearly a half mile underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Photo courtesy cbfo.doe.gov. Bottom —The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, located 26 miles southeast of Carlsbad, contributes 3,000 jobs and nearly $400 million a year to the region's economy. Photo by Tania Soussan.

Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy: www.energy.gov/ne/office-nuclear-energy

Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: www.wipp.energy.gov

Carlsbad Mayor's Nuclear Task Force: www.carlsbadnuclearnexus.com

Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future: http://energy.gov/ne/downloads/blue-ribbon-commission-americas-nuclear-future-report-secretary-energy

Nuclear Energy Institute: www.nei.org