Further complicating the situation at WIPP is the fact that it is located in Eddy County, where there were 592 oil and gas-related spills (63 percent of all the spills in New Mexico) in 2013.
During the first three months of 2014 there were 127 spills in Eddy County, which constituted 91 percent of the spills in the state. Not one enforcement action was referred to state Attorney General Tannis Fox, whose responsibility would have been to enforce state protocols against the spiller. Hence, by not referring actions to the attorney general, the state need not hold accountable the oil and gas companies responsible for spills. In fact, there has not been one enforcement action referred to the state attorney general during the entire time Governor Martinez has been in office.
As of May 2014, more than 3,600 reported violations of the New Mexico oil and gas drilling regulations had not been acted on. Several of these occurred in the vicinity of WIPP.
Despite these disconcerting statistics, the federal government has opted not to inspect high-risk wells and drilling in the area around WIPP.
Hancock pointed to yet another potentially catastrophic situation related to WIPP. "Eddy County has the highest highway accident rate in the state because of the heavy trucks with the fracking and oil and gas drilling, so we expect accidents with fracking and drilling vehicles and WIPP trucks, assuming the site gets reopened," he warned, as the trucks carrying large containers of radioactive waste en route to WIPP travel alongside those of the oil and gas companies. "Thus, traffic accidents could cause releases on the surface."
Thousands of Generations
Hancock, who has been monitoring WIPP since 1975 and is intimately familiar with the technical policy, regulatory and legal issues related to the site, reiterated what should be an obvious point: "Given that some of the wastes at WIPP are dangerous for thousands of generations, it is not an ideal place for storing wastes," he said. "That being the case, we can't predict what will happen with fracking ramifications that far into the future. The likelihood that the stability of the site will be disrupted is clear."
Judson was blunt about his assessment of what have been the formative years of the WIPP project.
"The issues of management and mismanagement just 15 years into the project speaks to the difficulties the government faces in managing nuclear waste," he said. "Given there is a renewed push to reopen Yucca Mountain, which has many of the same problems of WIPP, it raises a real question about the quality of management within DOE for the nuclear waste program."
WIPP contains plutonium and very toxic radio nuclides that could, if the integrity of the site is comprised as a result of the increasing fracking activity nearby, leak into New Mexico's groundwater and contaminate it for hundreds of thousands of years to come.
Judson asked why there is not a mandatory 100-mile boundary around the site, and his concluding comment remains what is perhaps the most important unanswered question of all: "Isolating nuclear waste is a national priority, but how much of a priority is it if they are going to allow these kinds of activities near a site like this?"
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