Nuclear waste dump receives 1,000th shipment as INEEL escalates shipments

[Susan L Gawarecki <loc@icx.net>]

Nuclear waste dump receives 1,000th shipment as INEEL escalates

shipments 

http://www.montanaforum.com/rednews/2002/07/18/build/pollution/nukewaste.php?nnn=5



CARLSBAD, N.M. (AP) – The federal government’s underground nuclear waste

dump has received its 1,000th shipment since opening more than three

years ago.  The milestone was reached with a shipment from the former

Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado last weekend, said Dan

Balduini, spokesman for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.

It was one of 26 shipments received last week, he said.  Fifteen of

those were from the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental

Laboratory, where the Energy Department has started picking up the pace

in the face of Dec. 31 deadline for moving 15,000 drums of

plutonium-contaminated waste out of eastern Idaho.  With the exception

of a few weeks, the New Mexico dump has been receiving 20 or more

shipments a week since the beginning of the year, Balduini said.  About

28,000 drums of waste have been delivered to the $2 billion facility

since it opened in March 1999.  More than 9,800 of them have come from

INEEL under a court-enforced waste cleanup agreement the state cut with

the federal government in 1995. 



Half those shipments were made since the year began, and officials said

they accelerating the schedule now that problems with equipment and

driver availability seem to have been resolved.  Dec. 31 is the first

major waste removal deadline that the Energy Department has had to meet

under the 1995 agreement. INEEL officials have targeted Nov. 15 for the

3,100th shipment.  Balduini emphasized that shipments to the New Mexico

facility have covered 2 million miles of road so far without incident. 

Under the Idaho agreement, all plutonium-contaminated waste must be

removed by 2019. The state and federal governments are at odds over

whether that includes 30,000 cubic meters of buried waste, and the state

has asked a federal judge to rule that it does. A decision is pending. 

The Bush administration has also proposed expediting cleanup – if

Congress provides the money – so that all plutonium-contaminated

material is removed by 2013, six years early. 



Thursday, July 18, 2002 

Copyright © 2000-2001 Montana Standard and Lee Enterprises.

-- 

.....................................................

Susan L. Gawarecki, Ph.D., Executive Director

Oak Ridge Reservation Local Oversight Committee

102 Robertsville Road, Suite B, Oak Ridge, TN 37830

Toll free 888-770-3073 ~ www.local-oversight.org

.....................................................

************************************************************************

You are currently subscribed to the Radsafe mailing list. To unsubscribe,

send an e-mail to Majordomo@list.vanderbilt.edu  Put the text "unsubscribe

radsafe" (no quote marks) in the body of the e-mail, with no subject line.

You can view the Radsafe archives at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/radsafe/