Top Department of Energy executives for the weapons complex Monday evening got an earful from a large and vocal crowd of New Mexico residents on everything from plutonium pit production to proposed new electric power lines near the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Also at one point during the 90-minute meeting, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) administrator Jill Hruby said “the time is coming when we really do need to look at additional repositories,” for defense-related transuranic waste, in addition to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
On hand too for the town hall was the recently-appointed senior adviser of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, Candice Robertson, who said her staff is developing a report, due out later this year, about DOE’s research into a new deep-underground transuranic waste repository located outside of New Mexico.
No such repository is planned, but such reports are now required annually under DOE’s new 10-year WIPP permit with the New Mexico Environment Department.
The two DOE officials made their WIPP remarks following comments from Don Hancock, director of the nuclear waste safety program and administrator at the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research and Information Center.
The NNSA has concluded it needs two locations to make plutonium pits, both the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Under this “same logic” DOE needs two transuranic waste repositories, so WIPP won’t pose a “single point of failure,” Hancock said.
It was a loud and at times acrimonious town hall-style public meeting, with the crowd frequently shouting at the DOE representatives. Many speakers criticized the feds on issues ranging from lack of compensation for nuclear downwinders, nuclear arms racing with Russia and China, housing scarcity and a new power line project proposed near Los Alamos.
About 23,000 public comments have been filed on the electric power line project and NNSA should “cancel the damn project: That will tell us that you’re listening,” said Greg Mello, co-founder of the antinuclear Los Alamos Study Group.
The meeting, held in Santa Fe, was webcast.