Putting the Los Alamos garbage “elsewhere”

New York Times (NYT) has an article about cleanup operations at Los Alamos, where waste is being “dug up and trucked elsewhere.” Best I can tell, “elsewhere” means dry storage and WIPP. For more detail, they also link to this report to Congress from the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management (EM). Aside from the report authors’ decision to use the word “disposition” as a verb, it’s a charming document – nice figures, important bits highlighted, useful executive summary. The NYT also cites the report’s upper estimate for the total cleanup cost as $260 billion, less than the $300 billion I had thought.

The article also includes a link to a DoE flyer about jobs created and saved by the Recovery Act. The good news for nuclear wastenistas is that if you live near one of these 18 locations (I’m 2.5 hours away from the nearest one – boooo) there are jobs. The not so good news is that they have 10,800 new or saved jobs and 73,000 job applicants. So about 14.8% of the people who applied for a job with the nuclear waste cleanup crew got/kept one.

Just for fun, let’s compare that number to college acceptance rates. Applying for and getting one of these nuclear waste cleanup jobs is very roughly equivalent to getting into Amherst, the 18th most selective college in the country. If the hiring/acceptance decisions are completely random, you have a better chance of getting into CalTech or Cornell than of getting one of these jobs.