Feds Say It Could Take Years To Seal Nuke Dump In New Mexico

 

 

May 31 2014

 

 

Not what anybody wants to hear! Inspectors re-enter New Mexico nuclear waste site after leak and they are not happy campers!

 

 

(Reuters) – Inspectors ventured into an underground nuclear waste disposal vault in New Mexico on Wednesday to begin an on-site investigation of a radiation leak nearly seven weeks ago that exposed 21 workers and forced a shutdown of the facility.

The mission by experts from the company that manages the site marked the first time since the mishap that workers have been sent deep into the salt caverns of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where drums of plutonium-tainted refuse from nuclear weapons factories and laboratories are buried.

The unexplained leak of radiation, a small amount of which escaped to the surface, ranked as the worst accident and one of the few blemishes on the plant’s safety record since it opened in 1999.

Located about 25 miles (40 km) east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Chihuahuan Desert, the facility is the nation’s only permanent repository for the U.S. government’s stockpile of nuclear waste, much of it left over from the Cold War era.

The waste, including discarded machinery, clothing and other materials contaminated with plutonium or other radioisotopes heavier than uranium, are sealed in chambers carved into salt formations more than 2,100 feet (640 meters) beneath the desert surface.

The plant has been closed to further deliveries of waste since Feb. 14, when an air-monitoring system detected an unexplained release of radiation underground.

Although an alarm automatically switched the ventilation system to filtration to keep radiation from spreading, trace amounts of manmade isotopes such as americium-241, a byproduct of nuclear weapons manufacturing, were measured at the surface.

Testing of workers at the site, all of whom were above ground at the time, showed that 21 were contaminated, though managers of the plant said the level of exposure was too low to pose any health risks.

 

 

SOURCE OF LEAK UNDETERMINED

 

 

The U.S. Department of Energy and the contractor that runs the repository, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, have said there was no threat to the public or environment.

The source of the radiation leak has not been determined, but a DOE spokesman at the agency’s Carlsbad office, Ben Williams, said one theory is there might have been a structural collapse at one of the storage compartments, or panels.

Experts suspect the release was most likely to have originated in one compartment, Panel 7, where material had recently been added, Williams said. Read more or listen to the video in this post.

 

 

 

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