Post by Ex_Nuke_Troop on Mar 7, 2014 1:07:24 GMT
NY Times 1992 : Wasting Away
From the bright sunlight and mesquite of the high plains in southern New Mexico, it's a five-minute elevator ride down to the spectral darkness of the world's first deep geologic repository for nuclear wastes. Nearly 2,200 feet underground, the air is warm and tastes of salt dust stirred up by the fleet of forklifts, carts and debris haulers that turn the wide passages mined from rock salt into thoroughfares as busy as a small-town main street.
In one corridor, light floods from the mouth of a storage room filled with stainless-steel pumps and red digital gauges. Overhead, steel beams, rock bolts and wire mesh support the roof. Down another corridor, the sound of metal pounding on the rock salt walls resonates with the same painful clarity of a jackhammer breaking up concrete. Burly miners run the big machines, their headlamps like bouncing scratches of light against the midnight black.
What began in the early 1950's as Project Salt Vault has now become the most elaborate and expensive tomb ever built in the United States. The Department of Energy has been testing a 40-year-old theory in the $1.3 billion waste plant: that prehistoric salt beds might be the best place to entomb radioactive wastes. Salt lies deep in the earth and can easily contain deadly radiation. Salt is also comparatively soft and creeps like ice under intense geologic pressures. Over time, rock salt would gradually flow around the buried radioactive wastes, sealing them in a permanent hard cocoon.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant -- or WIPP, as it is popularly known -- is a seven-mile lacework of shadowed passages and murky storage rooms 26 miles east of the town of Carlsbad. It is the closest the Government has ever come to a final solution for ridding the country of the lethal byproducts of manufacturing nuclear arms. With the exception of Sweden, which is testing a deep repository mined from granite, no other nation is close to developing a permanent radioactive waste site of this scale. ...
www.nytimes.com/1992/08/30/magazine/wasting-away.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1
From the bright sunlight and mesquite of the high plains in southern New Mexico, it's a five-minute elevator ride down to the spectral darkness of the world's first deep geologic repository for nuclear wastes. Nearly 2,200 feet underground, the air is warm and tastes of salt dust stirred up by the fleet of forklifts, carts and debris haulers that turn the wide passages mined from rock salt into thoroughfares as busy as a small-town main street.
In one corridor, light floods from the mouth of a storage room filled with stainless-steel pumps and red digital gauges. Overhead, steel beams, rock bolts and wire mesh support the roof. Down another corridor, the sound of metal pounding on the rock salt walls resonates with the same painful clarity of a jackhammer breaking up concrete. Burly miners run the big machines, their headlamps like bouncing scratches of light against the midnight black.
What began in the early 1950's as Project Salt Vault has now become the most elaborate and expensive tomb ever built in the United States. The Department of Energy has been testing a 40-year-old theory in the $1.3 billion waste plant: that prehistoric salt beds might be the best place to entomb radioactive wastes. Salt lies deep in the earth and can easily contain deadly radiation. Salt is also comparatively soft and creeps like ice under intense geologic pressures. Over time, rock salt would gradually flow around the buried radioactive wastes, sealing them in a permanent hard cocoon.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant -- or WIPP, as it is popularly known -- is a seven-mile lacework of shadowed passages and murky storage rooms 26 miles east of the town of Carlsbad. It is the closest the Government has ever come to a final solution for ridding the country of the lethal byproducts of manufacturing nuclear arms. With the exception of Sweden, which is testing a deep repository mined from granite, no other nation is close to developing a permanent radioactive waste site of this scale. ...
www.nytimes.com/1992/08/30/magazine/wasting-away.html?src=pm&pagewanted=1