The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Pendleton, Ore., will conduct “activities to ensure the safe transportation” of nuclear waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico under a five-year, $375,000 cooperative agreement with the Energy Department.
DOE announced the arrangement in a press release Monday.
The agreement will help the tribes ensure safe transportation of waste through Pueblo lands via transportation planning, and also train and equip the tribes to respond to an emergency related to WIPP shipments, DOE said in the release.
WIPP is slated to reopen late this year or early next after a nearly three-year pause in waste-disposal operations. The mine, located near Carlsbad, N.M., has not accepted any shipments of transuranic waste since an accidental underground radiation release and earlier, unrelated underground fire in February 2014.
Pendleton sits along Interstate 84, southeast of DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.