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.

Disposal Facilities and Repositories

Is there a difference between a "geologic repository" and a "disposal facility" for nuclear waste?

Merriam-Webster defines repository as "a place, room, or container where something is deposited or stored". (Also: a side altar in a Roman Catholic church - who knew?). The free dictionary's top picks are "a place where things may be kept for safekeeping" and "a warehouse". "Repository" does not clearly denote permanence, unlike "disposal".

There are now three low-level waste disposal facilities in the U.S. (Barnwell, SC; Richland, WA; Clive, UT). The facility in Utah, by the way, is run by a company that was in the news recently for wanting to import waste from Italy.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) is a facility in a bedded salt deposit outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico that has been accepting both low level waste and transuranics (this usually means elements heavier than U) since 1999.

Are all of four of these facilities repositories? There are certainly references around the internet for each facility being described as either or both of these terms. Still, there is a tendency to only use the term “repository” for big projects that can accept highly radioactive waste. I have also heard WIPP described as the only operational repository for nuclear waste in the world. (Perhaps it is the only operational deep repository in the world?)

I am sometimes dismayed by the conflation of the terms “repository” and “disposal site” because it reflects a certain level of confusion and potentially conflicting goals in handling nuclear waste: We want to put our extra U and Pu in a safe place – so safe that everything will be fine if we call the stuff waste and leave it there for thousands of years – but we also on some level want the option of retrieving those energy sources from our nuclear warehouse if we decide we need them 200 years from now. On second thought, maybe the dual term is exactly right.