Just WIPP It
Does the history of the nation's only nuclear waste repository have anything to teach us?
Two hundred and sixty-five million years ago, what eventually became the city of Carlsbad, NM was under water. The Delaware Sea stretched from some ten thousand square miles across western Texas and a small chunk of New Mexico. The world was a lot hotter then, some eight Celsius warmer than today, far hotter than even the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. The planet eventually cooled. The Delaware Sea slowly receded as ocean levels dropped worldwide, leaving behind a thick layer of salt, up to two thousand feet thick in some places. Millions of years later, some see this geological inheritance as a gift, a place to safeguard nuclear waste for the coming millennia.
Carlsbad’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) was first proposed in 1972 as a storage site for spent nuclear fuel, one carved deep into the remnants of the Delaware Sea. It wouldn’t start receiving nuclear material until 1999. And, even then, it was no longer a planned home for spent uranium but rather transuranic waste, the clothing, tools, soils, and other materials merely contaminated by nuclear work and only slightly radioactive. Still, it’s the only permanent nuclear waste repository currently in the United States, and will probably continue to the sole facility for the foreseeable future.
Some believe that we are (finally) entering a “nuclear renaissance.” Everyone seems to want a nuclear reactor. Three Mile Island may get restarted in 2028 to power Microsoft’s AI ambitions. Dow is looking into small modular designs in order to supply heat to its chemical plants. Oracle hopes to use three reactors to run a single gigantic data center.
Enthusiasm will probably dampen, once we learn the economic realities of new reactor designs. In any event, the new nuclear bandwagon will only make the need to find places to house spent nuclear fuel even more pressing. And these places will only get built if the public trusts the ability of the federal government and nuclear engineers to deliver. Does the history of WIPP provide us with any guidance?
That’s a tough ask. The fact that WIPP actually got built is as much an accident of history as a product of conscious intelligent strategizing. But might we be able to recreate the process?
Between Hostility and Cooperation
Carlsbad only got on policymakers’ radar after an effort to build a storage facility in the salt beds around Lyons, Kansas failed. Salt layers are attractive locations to store nuclear waste, because they tend to be dry, uniform, and stable. The rock salt “flows” over time, tending to “heal” cracks that form. But the Kansans couldn’t overcome their skepticism of the Atomic Energy Commission. The agency seemed evasive in answering questions about the proposed steel casks or about the instabilities potentially created by previous mining activity. The anticipated economic benefits seemed to pale in face of the potential risks.
Upon hearing the news about Lyons, Kansas in 1972, New Mexico state senator Joe Grant Jr. called up his congressional representative and asked, “Why not Carlsbad?” The area was suffering economically. Long at the behest of booms and busts in the oil and potash industries, nuclear waste storage seemed like a long-term investment in the community’s future. Given all the Manhattan Project’s laboratory was doing for the town of Los Alamos, hitching Carlsbad’s future to the new nuclear economy looked like a worthy gamble, and most local residents agreed.
Yet, if the project had so much local support, why did it take over twenty-five years to turn the project into a reality?
One reason is that Carlsbadians still needed to get the rest of state on board. Waste would travel on New Mexico’s public roads to get there, and people in northern New Mexico didn’t share locals’ enthusiasm to join the nuclear economy.
The biggest cause of delay was the fact that the Department of Energy continually overplayed its hand. The agency kept trying to transform WIPP from a transuranic waste repository into one that also stored high-level waste. New Mexico was initially offered “veto power” over the project, only to have that become an ambiguous promise of “concurrence.”
Ongoing conflict and lawsuits eventually forced the feds to “consult and cooperate.” The state got the right to independently monitor WIPP and money to do its own scientific assessment. The fact that Congress had to eventually intervene to explicitly limit the kinds of waste that WIPP would receive suggests that the collaboration between the DoE and New Mexico wasn’t as amicable and respectful as it should have been.
Despite a number of missteps and wrong turns, the process was nevertheless produced a series of compromises and concessions that kept the project alive. The creation of a quasi-independent evaluation group within the EPA helped to smooth things over when Energy Department’s action turned, in the words of journalist Chuck McCutcheon, “a once cooperative state government to a hostile one.” The result was that between 1980 and 1998, when WIPP was ready to open, support among New Mexicans had risen from 26 to 49 percent.
Searching for Safety
Science understandably took center stage during public meetings regarding WIPP. Then-governor Susana Martinez took the stage at one WIPP-related event to insist, “[A]t the end of the day, the science must be the decision-maker. At the end of the day, it must be the science that will lead us to the best decision that will be in the best interest of the community and of our nation.”
As scholar Jennifer Richter noted, governmental representatives often tried to scientize the debate in public meetings, to deny that everyone’s perceptions of WIPP’s risks were inherently based on their personal values. But that doesn’t mean that members of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) weren’t trying to do the same thing. In public meetings and in their own media, nuclear opponents don’t just bring up value considerations but also marshal their own competing facts.
Even the absence of facts was used to cook up seemingly unquestionable certitudes. No one knows what human societies will look like in thousands of years, assuming we still exist, nor how we might deter future civilizations from digging down to WIPP’s storage area. Yet, we also have no idea if any future societies would actually try to do so. Nevertheless, opponents see unambiguous dangers, even if through a glass darkly. Don Hancock, a director at the Southwest Research and Information Center, maintained that the proximity of oil, gas, and potash resources in the vicinity meant that “it is certain that the site will inevitably be breached by future exploration and production which will cause large releases of radioactivity.”
Environmentalists from Santa Fe, for their part, focused on the risks of transporting wastes from Los Alamos to Carlsbad. The Department of Energy tried to assure northern New Mexicans by planning a bypass road, and by designing containers that would remain unscathed even if dropped from thirty feet and burned with jet fuel. Trucks would be monitored by satellite 24 hours a day, and drivers would be required to reinspect the cargo every 100 miles. But opponents pointed to the fact that two containers failed their certification tests. How can you guarantee that, over the course of tens of thousands of shipments, that a road accident couldn’t exceed these conditions or happen to a defective container?
Such guarantees, of course, are impossible. The incredible scales inherent to nuclear waste storage combine with the unavoidable uncertainties of the effort to allow ENGOs to plausibly claim that mistakes will inevitably happen.
The “what if?” problem is part of the reason why science almost never can settle contentious technological disputes, especially when the changes being sought have yet to move from paper to the real world. Because science can’t provide total certainty, people’s imaginations can easily run amok with catastrophic visions. A fairly mundane example is how NIMBYs in Albuquerque, NM have fanatically opposed plans to permit duplexes in suburban neighborhoods, citing farfetched scenarios of parking shortages and nightmarish traffic congestion, despite no shortage of contrary evidence from the other side. They can easily imagine that these studies are incomplete, biased, or simply wrong.
Steve Rayner and Daniel Sarewtiz noted that people’s “sense of science’s reliability is significantly created by [their] experiences with technology.” Medicines bring our children’s fevers down. We walk away relatively unscathed from car accidents. We rarely hear of passenger jets crashing. It is technology that “makes science real for us.” As such, the trustworthiness of WIPP could only be established by efforts to turn the proposed storage site into a reality, to demonstrate that it could actually be built and run without major mistakes.
In a telling moment at a public meeting, Senator Pete Domenici erupted in frustration over Don Hancock’s unceasing interventions. He argued that ENGO activists liked to claim that the historical failure to safeguard nuclear waste signals that governments and nuclear firms couldn’t ever have their acts together, that they were incapable of responsibly stewarding WIPP. In Domenici’s view, ENGOs don’t actually “want to solve the problems” of nuclear waste storage. They seek delays so that they can come to public meetings and say “[the government is] not doing their job.” ENGOs were seeking to undermine the very thing that would demonstrate the government’s willingness and ability to safeguard nuclear waste: building WIPP.
…we can’t really wait for the fortuitous arrival of communities in dire financial straits but also with suitable local geology and a long history of success with both nuclear technology and underground construction.
Whether or not Senator Domenici was correct in assessing Hancock’s motivations, it still reveals an important consideration as demand increases for a permanent nuclear storage facility. The scale of WIPP required a long timeline for construction. It made the consequences of mistakes seem not merely concerning, but potentially catastrophic. This amplified the calls to scientifically assure safety, which was something just beyond the reach of what expert analysts could provide.
It is little wonder then that public conversation around WIPP, and similar technologies, frequently turns into more of a culture war than a good faith democratic negotiation. Participation is less about hammering out compromises and more about offering up performative spectacles, situations meant to make one’s opponents look irresponsible, incompetent, or uncaring. Such is necessary to fill the gaps in scientific assessments, to turn anxiety-inducing uncertainties into comforting certitudes. In one Albuquerque event, a group of self-described “Raging Grannies” broke out in song, setting lyrics alluding to a future nuclear holocaust to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland.” As we’ve pointed out in past posts, these kinds of performative confrontations are not what democracy really looks like.
Recreating WIPP
WIPP got built because a whole lot happened to just go right. One decisive factor, apart from the site offering much needed economic stability, was the region’s history with nuclear technology. As part of Project Plowshare, a nuclear bomb was detonated in 1961 in a local salt dome, with the hope that pumping water through the molten salt could generate electricity. The idea, Project Gnome, was a flop, but the town’s inclusion in the nascent nuclear industry was a source of local pride. And it also helped that the resulting radiation was well contained within the salt dome and didn’t sicken any residents.
In other words, what tipped the scales for locals was their previous positive experiences with related technologies. Local workers’ experience with potash mining was also cast as a resource. One resident recounted, “WIPP inherited Carlsbad’s safety culture, which came from the potash industry.” WIPP showcased the continuation of that safety culture via the public tours they offered. Visitors could see for themselves how seriously the site’s workers took the risks.
Unprecedented levels of transparency and participation, despite occasional missteps, kept New Mexico’s state government at the negotiating table. Decades of compromises left New Mexico’s government without a legal leg to stand one, when it eventually got cold feet. After the courts rejected the state’s last ditch efforts to block the project in 1999, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson approved the first shipment from Los Alamos to Carlsbad. Yet, as Jon Goldstein pointed out, the fact that Richardson would soon win the state’s governorship by the largest margin to date shows that relatively few New Mexicans held any serious grudges about the project.
But we can’t really wait for the fortuitous arrival of communities in dire financial straits but also with suitable local geology and a history of success with both nuclear technology and underground construction. There aren’t many Carlsbads already out there. We’ll have to try to incrementally recreate the conditions that made WIPP happen.
If federal government agencies learn from WIPP, they should know to practice more forbearance next time. Keeping state governments at the negotiating table for potential nuclear repositories will require offering a lot of carrots and avoiding using sticks. WIPP was almost dead in the water at several stages when the feds kept trying to take far more than New Mexico was willing to give.
It will also be essential to scale down proposed projects, at least initially. No doubt the piles of high-level nuclear waste growing ever larger in storage pools around the country arguably pose a bigger danger than any long-term repository. But haste will only make the politics more unworkable. Nuclear waste storage is a case where slow and smooth will be far faster than the gridlock and contention generated by grand plans.
 | A guest post by
|