WIPP: Two Thousand Feet Underground for Ten Thousand Years

Twenty-six miles east of Carlsbad, in a flat expanse of the Chihuahuan Desert, radioactive waste from the United States nuclear weapons program is stored in rooms carved two thousand one hundred fifty feet underground in ancient salt beds. The facility is called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and it is the first operating deep geological repository for nuclear waste in the United States. It is licensed to hold that waste for ten thousand years.

The idea of using the salt beds near Carlsbad as a nuclear storage site originated in the nineteen seventies. The Department of Energy had tried to establish a similar facility in Kansas. Kansas said no. Carlsbad was more willing to negotiate. A closure of potash mines had put people out of work, and the community saw the facility as an economic replacement. Congress authorized construction of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in nineteen seventy-nine.

The first shipment of nuclear waste arrived from Los Alamos National Laboratory on March twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-nine. A single truck drove three hundred forty-two miles across the state. Hundreds of people cheered along the highway in Carlsbad as it arrived. Dozens of protesters had jeered it as it passed through Santa Fe.

The waste stored here is not spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors. It is transuranic waste, meaning contaminated tools, clothing, and equipment from decades of weapons manufacturing, material that contains elements heavier than uranium and remains hazardous for many thousands of years. A drum ruptured inside the facility on February fourteenth, twenty fourteen, and WIPP stopped receiving waste until twenty seventeen. The site resumed operations and continues to accept shipments today.