February 1, 1996
Web posted at: 11:55 p.m. EST (0455 GMT)
From Correspondent Anne McDermott
CARLSBAD, New Mexico -- Carlsbad is a nice little town. Maybe you've even passed through it on your way to the nearby Carlsbad Caverns, those natural wonders of nature. But Carlsbad is now becoming known for some other nearby caverns created by man and being prepped for nuclear waste storage.
You travel 2,000 feet into the earth and enter into a dark maze of tunnels and rooms, seven and half miles worth of tunnels and rooms, all carved out of a giant bed of salt.
The rooms will be used to store nuclear waste.
Nuclear bombs leave more than debris in their wake: They leave transuranic waste, contaminated by man-made radioactive elements, like plutonium, generated in weapons production.
Which leaves the question, what to do with it?
The Department of Energy thinks that the facility of underground caverns, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP, which is about 40 miles from Carlsbad Caverns, is the answer.
Proponents say it's a safe way to store radioactive waste, but not everyone has always been so sure. Protesters were on hand when construction began in 1981, and today, there are still those who question WIPP's safety, who worry about transporting waste there, and who are concerned about its very location.
"There's a growing feeling that the Southwest and New Mexico in particular is becoming kind of a nuclear sacrifice zone," says Susan Hirshberg of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety.
But the assistant principal of Alta Vista Middle School, who also happens to be mayor of Carlsbad, supports WIPP, because he believes that it's safe and because it boosts the economy.
"We get some jobs, and people here needed some jobs, and that's helpful," Mayor Gary Perkowski says.
Officials say that if all goes as planned, WIPP will begin accepting nuclear waste in the spring of 1998. Activists say that's too soon and that there has to be some sort of national discussion of the issue first.
"We need to make sure that politics doesn't win out over science, that politics doesn't win out over human safety," Hirshberg says.
But a Department of Energy official in Carlsbad points out that millions of cubic feet of waste are sitting around, above ground, waiting for permanent disposal.
With WIPP, George Dials says, even the worst-case scenario wouldn't be so bad. "If our society were to collapse, if we lost control, institutional control of these wastes, our position is, it would be much better for the waste to be disposed of 2,150 feet underground in a 225 million-year-old salt formation that it would be to leave them on the surface," Dials says.
And in the man-made caverns outside Carlsbad, the work goes on and sometimes, visitors come by, just as they do in those other caverns outside of town.
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