Beneath Apache Country: Inside
WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Project)

by Alan Sussex

I could see the waste elevator that would take us back up 2150 feet to the surface, at the far end of the storage tunnel. Howard pulled our vehicle over and parked it in line behind the others. He went to the desk to check our completed tour with the operator, who punched it into the computer.

There were about a half a dozen fellows talking while waiting to go back up. One held some video tapes as they stood around a large metal locker that contained instruments and possibly samples of their work. They had come from their home base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 275 miles northwest of here, to conduct experiments within the salt for the DOE.

In 15 minutes they were joined by five others. We all got on the lower section of the elevator for the plutonium waste. It’s two-tiered. The upper can hold 75 workers, the lower can carry up to 45 tons of plutonium 239 contaminated waste. Six steel rope cables, each 1-3/8 inches in diameter, hoisted us to the surface by way of a 600 horsepower motor. If for some reason we would lose power on the way up, hydraulic pressure would supposedly automatically operate a braking system.

It’s estimated that during the 25-year operating life of this hoist it will carry over 6.5 million cubic feet of "CH" (contact handled) and about 5000 canisters of "RH" (remote handled) waste, all of which is TransUranic. RH is handled by remote-control equipment because of the gamma and beta rays that are emitted from those wastes. The operator must be protected and away from it.

RH waste is contained in a canister, which in turn is inside a facility cask that reduces the gamma and beta rays. Offloaded from the elevator, by 41-ton capacity diesel powered enclosed forklift truck, it’s transported to one of the disposal rooms within the salt. A disposal room for RH is carved out of the salt, with a series of two foot diameter holes bored into its walls.

Once in the disposal room the facility cask will be placed on a machine in which a hydraulic ram pushes the RH canister into the pre-drilled hole in the wall. After the waste is in place the hole will be plugged and the cask reused. Three percent of the waste destined for the WIPP is to be RH waste. The elevator that’s going to bring that stuff down is now going to transport us up the 19 foot diameter shaft almost ½ mile in 5 minutes.

As we start up the hazy light is left behind once again - only our helmet lamps illuminate the elevator and walls passing by. The men from Sandia Labs are talking, a fellow near me is happily telling his co-workers of the fishing vacation he’ll be taking this weekend. They swap envious accounts of lakes and places already enjoyed and those planned. They talk of simple pleasures, and of being away from where they’re at…their jobs! Jobs that pay better than most in an area where there are few to be had (of any kind), even in good times.

I think about the 700 workers on this project site, each one doing his own small part to bring about somebody’s idea on how to get rid of 40,000 tons of the most deadly and dangerous substance on earth.

The air rushing by us in the caged elevator cools me down, it feels good to be out of the hot and humid salt. Curtis steps over and asks what I think about the project; I feel he’s trying to get some feedback about my bias and how I might write about what I’ve seen. I put him off by saying, " I’m trying to digest all that I’ve just seen," which I truly was, but mostly I didn’t want our chatter to disrupt my concentration on what I’m thinking, hearing and feeling.

Getting cooler now as we near the top, the elevator slows, crashes, then jiggles as it slides onto the alignment pins. We’re up and out of there. Leaving the elevator we return to the equipment room in the same building and take off our emergency breathing apparatus, helmet lamp, hip battery pack and belt.

The air rushes in as we exit the last door (negative air pressure, to keep any wayward radioactive particles from escaping out into the atmosphere when the time comes), and walk outside into the sunlight. How nice it is to be out of there. I think to myself what a terrible place it would be to work down there or anyplace underground away from the blue sky and sun. Walking towards the guard house I talk with Howard about my returning with my camera on another day. Howard says fine, just call and set up another appointment. They had already done a second security check before I was authorized to film this trip as a media representative, but first I had wanted to get an overview of what was going on here, so I would know what to record later.

Entering the guard room, we’re again confronted by the two guards and again directed to draw the next plastic card in line from the metal box (red dot on the card means that you must submit to a body search). No dots, so we’re allowed to proceed to the office where we sign out and turn in our brass tags.

Walking toward the main gate, we bid each other good-bye. Curtis and Howard leave me as I walk towards my car. It’s going on 3:00 PM, a beautiful sunny day, but a hot 95 degrees in this New Mexico desert.

It’s been a long day as I drive away from WIPP, trying to remember all that I’ve just experienced. Looking in my mirror I can see the large sign near the site that warns, "No guns, drugs, alcohol or bombs allowed on the property" - only plutonium 239.

After 5.5 miles I’m at Highway 128, turning right I pass the large flooded salt lake area on my left, I think about the Restler Aquifer above the WIPP project site and about the thousands of truck loads of plutonium that will come down this narrow asphalt road and other roads all around the country, and the fact that there isn’t any insurance coverage for "anyone or anything" in the event of a spill. Or the fact that few emergency response personnel even know its coming through their areas and haven’t been given training or equipment to respond effectively to an accident.

On my way to the site early this morning, I had avoided running over a number of desert tortoises that cross these roads. I had noticed one slowly crossing into the other lane as I passed and had hoped it would make it safely across before being hit like some others on the road.

A little further down, a truck passed me going in the opposite direction. I thought it would be a close one, for the turtle would be just about in the driving path when that truck would get there. Now as I drive past the salt lake and approach the place again, I sigh with sadness as I see it crushed in the road. Sometimes you can see an accident coming, and you can’t seem to do much about it.

Driving away from WIPP and towards Carlsbad, I pass by another potash plant just a few miles away. There are many such fertilizer and chemical companies located in the area. I wonder what will happen years from now after the plutonium waste is buried and future miners come here looking to harvest these and other minerals? Drilling down into the burial site or beyond into the pressurized brine, a geyser erupts to the surface contaminating the area, taking the radionuclei wherever the winds blow.

The BLM (Bureau of Land Management) has transferred 10,000 acres to the DOE (Department of Energy) in order to try and create a sort of buffer around the underground disposal area. Because the transfer of land wasn’t done in the conventional manner, it is currently being contested in the courts. If the court finds in WIPP’s favor, testing with plutonium will begin. The DOE has also hired 13 experts to come up with a design that will want unsuspecting individuals to stay well away for the next 10,000 years.

Working for Sandia National Laboratories, they have 3 anthropologists, 2 astronomers, 2 material scientists, an archaeologist, a geologist, a linguist, an artist, an architect and a cognitive psychologist. These experts are creating messages, using pictographs to warn people away in the future who may not understand contemporary languages. The messages would be placed above and below ground where they might be discovered.

In addition, they propose warning people away from the site with a giant marker. Some examples of their designs include "Landscape of Thorns," "Spike Field" and "Spikes Bursting Through Grid." A fourth design, "Menacing Earthworks" has long (80 foot) tapered and pointed earthworks, similar to lightning bolts.

The other three designs include "Black Hole" a slab of black rock that will absorb everything. "Rubble Landscape" is a huge pile of bull-dozed stone and "Forbidding Blocks" uses irregular cubes (so that they can’t be recycled and used as building material) to "outline narrow streets that lead nowhere." These warning marks would need to cover (and go beyond) the current 10 miles (proposed 20 miles) underground grid of disposal tunnels.

Magnetic materials would be mixed into the above ground that’s been chosen to draw the curious towards the center where a central granite structure would contain a map of the world’s nuclear waste sites. These markers would need to last twice as long as the great pyramid of Cheos, or over 10,000 years.

But would these giant markers keep people away for 10 millennia? Or would they merely attract future archaeologists, the curious, and the clever fortune hunters to try and discover what and why someone would go through so much work to try and prevent them from getting at something.

Crossing another set of railroad tracks I think about the 30,000 truckloads of waste that will come down this road. These trucks will cross 23 states and 26 native reservations around the country on the way to WIPP.

Thirty percent of the waste carried by those trucks will come from existing stock piles, while 70% is designated to carry waste created as a result of future nuclear weapons development and testing that will occur over the next 20 years.

WIPP will only hold a tiny portion, about 1% of this nation’s current plutonium waste, it is not intended to address the 300 million cubic feet of radioactive wastes that for over 40 years has been disposed of in pits; ponds and trenches, buried in cardboard boxes and even intentionally injected into deep wells.

Independent sources cited in the WIPP Environmental Statement predict that there will be between 88 and 129 transportation accidents over the operational lifetime of WIPP (25 years).

Here in California, plutonium waste will leave Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory southeast of San Francisco and travel south down Interstate 5 to the heart of Los Angeles where it will transfer to the most heavily traveled and congested freeway in California, Interstate 10-East (San Bernadino Freeway). From there it will head north to the I-40. Heading east on I-40 twenty five miles on this side of the Nevada border and Needles, it will pass (on your right) Ward Valley, also a proposed nuclear waste disposal site, but not for plutonium contaminated waste. Passing the Ward Valley site the truck heading for WIPP will pass through Needles and then cross the Colorado River into Arizona.

Each truck will carry three TRUPACT II containers weighing 24,000 pounds each. Inside each Trupact II are fourteen 55 gallon drums of waste, 60-80% of which will be mixed with hazardous material, such as solvents and chemicals. Much of it will be flammable and highly volatile. There is the possibility that items contained within these drums might spontaneously ignite.

The DOE (Department of Energy) admits there will be radiation exposure to the public through the Trupact II containers (F-SEIS, Vol. 2, Pg. L-15) for the CH (Contact Handled) waste. A dose equivalent to a chest X-ray would be received if a person were exposed for one hour within six feet of the container. No information for radiation dosage has been released as of yet for the much stronger RH waste (Remote handled) that must be handled by means of robotics because of the radiation’s ability to penetrate thick materials.

Some of these plutonium contaminated wastes emit gamma rays that can pass through almost three feet of concrete. (Most physicians agree that there is no safe level of radiation exposure).

I think about one of these trucks stuck in bumper to bumper traffic in LA, surrounded by drivers looking and wondering what those three huge beautifully spun and shiny stainless steel containers are for, as they idle next to or behind them. Sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you!