Musk Attacks The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant
By Last night a report came through that Musk’s boys want to eliminate the DOE office in Carlsbad, New Mexico. It’s not clear if they are terminating the lease for the building or firing the people too.
According to the article, the building contains offices for 200 people and an emergency response center.
The DOE Carlsbad Office manages the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which is the respository for defense wastes. The office manages the several operating contracts needed to operate the plant and coordinates among the contractors. It needs to be there to keep the plant receiving wastes from DOE sites across the country. The repository is 2000 feet underground, in the middle of a large salt bed, so there is no immediate danger, but, like many other things DOGE is destroying, there will be problems in the future or if an unexpected event occurs.
WIPP is actually kind of cool. It’s a long elevator ride down to the respository area, and once you’re there, it’s all salt: walls, ceiling, and floor. It feels like the various salt mines in Europe. Barrels of waste are emplaced in rooms carved out of the salt. Eventually, the salt will flow around them and immobilize them.
Most of the waste contains small amounts of plutonium: wipes and broken tools that have been used in gloveboxes with plutonium and other transuranium elements, booties and labcoats, other protective wear. More recently, WIPP has accepted other wastes, like the legacy wastes that have been stored at Los Alamos’s Area G. Those wastes are in metal barrels, in tents to protect from the weather. Before they are sent to WIPP, they are examined to make sure that nothing in them will explode or leak. Several years back, the group preparing them for shipment made a mistake that caused one of the barrels to burst. That shut down WIPP for 2 years, but no significant radiation leaked.
I looked for an org chart or list of contractors, but the DOE website doesn’t seem to have either. Here are organizations that seem to have some part in running the site.
Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, LLC. This has a URL that implies it’s the overall site for WIPP.
Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC (NWP) is a Amentum-led entity with partner BWXT and major subcontractor ORANO. “We manage and operate the U.S. Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southeast New Mexico.”
Bechtel “manages and operates the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in Carlsbad, Mexico.” [sic]
The DOE website has a nice video of the site. If you watch it, you may be able to discern the DOGE animus toward the site. It also lists additional contracts. I would like to know the functions of all these contractors, but my relatively quick search this morning failed to uncover that.
There is also an underground laboratory at the site for physics experiments. This poses no danger to the public but is one more activity that the DOE office supervises.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner