Former N.M. State Officials Spar Over Plutonium Storage at WIPP

With momentum building for a 2016 reopening of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), two former New Mexico officials wrote dueling editorials staking out opposing positions on storing diluted plutonium at the underground facility.

 

Bill Richardson, former congressman, U.S. energy secretary, and two-term governor of New Mexico, came out strongly against the idea in a Jan. 11 piece in the Las Cruces Sun-News. Richardson’s position, that WIPP was not designed to store plutonium and is not large enough to accommodate the volumes of the material a DOE-commissioned report said could be interred there, was rebutted in a Carlsbad Current-Argus column by former New Mexico state representative John Heaton, who is now chair of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force.

 

The back-and-forth between Richardson and Heaton is predicated on what for now is a hypothetical scenario in which 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium the U.S. agreed to convert into mixed-oxide commercial reactor fuel under an arms-reduction pact with Russia would instead be diluted into non-weapons-usable form and stored at WIPP.

 

A 2015 report commissioned by the Department of Energy found this so-called dilute-and-dispose option was cheaper than processing the material at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C.

Dilute-and-disposal would “move tons of dangerous nuclear weapons-grade plutonium to WIPP, and overwhelm WIPP’s capability to clean up Cold War waste from sites in Washington, Idaho and elsewhere,” Richardson wrote in the Las Cruces newspaper. “Not true!” Heaton countered in the Current-Argus. Heaton said the proposed dilution would turn the weapon-grade material into an inert form that is, legally speaking, exactly the sort of transuranic waste WIPP is licensed to store. Heaton also said DOE has developed only a fraction of the 16 square miles of underground salt caverns to which it has access at WIPP.