N.M. - The inaugural load of radioactive waste arrived Friday to herald the opening of the nation's first permanent nuclear waste repository. Federal officials called it a step toward solving the problem of where to put waste from decades of weapons work. Earlier in the trip and farther north, the truck faced a scattering of protesters, including two young women who sat down in the road and a man who tried to block the highway with his car. The truck's arrival at WIPP sparked eager anticipation at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which is scheduled to send its first shipment of transuranic wastes to New Mexico in October.
Transuranic wastes are plutonium-contaminated debris, junk, tools and clothes.
They are stored in 55-gallon barrels. Hanford has 80,000 to 100,000 drums of transuranic wastes, mostly in trenches in the 200 West Area. A barrel with holes and cracks drastically increases the difficulty and expense of handling them. The barrels eventually are to be put inside gigantic special canisters - more than twice the height of a man and as wide as a flatbed truck. Fourteen barrels would go inside each canister.