New Mexico Radioactive Waste Showdown

Published: Jan. 23, 2019, 9:44 p.m.

New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) radioactive waste problems examined in Libbe HaLevy’s interview with Don Hancock, Executive Director of the Southwest Research and Information Center, a nuclear watchdog group headquartered in Albuquerque. The group focuses on the goings-on at WIPP, this country’s only deep geological repository for low level nuclear waste. He gives us an update on conditions at WIPP since its 2014 accidents closed it down, along with the intense political wrangling going on right now about changing regulations to allow WIPP to take high level waste it’s not designed to handle. We also go into the battle raging right now over the threat of the world’s largest radioactive waste dump being situated in New Mexico and/or New Mexico-adjacent in West Texas.