Northern N.M. advisory board tours WIPP

By Kyle Marksteiner
Current-Argus Staff Writer

Article Launched: 08/14/2008 09:06:04 PM MDT

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CARLSBAD — A group of visitors spent most of Thursday at an underground location near Carlsbad.
That’s nothing new, only these “tourists” were visiting the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant east of Carlsbad, not Carlsbad Caverns National Park to the south.
The Northern New Mexico Citizens’ Advisory Board is a community group chartered in 1997 to provide citizen input to the Department of Energy on issues related to environmental monitoring and waste management. Their focus is often related to Los Alamos National Laboratory, but members came down to WIPP this week to get a better understanding of where the transuranic waste at LANL will end up.
Ralph Phelps, vice-chair of the board and chair of the group’s waste management committee, said the board consists of 22 people, but only about half of the members were able to make the this week’s trip to Carlsbad.
Phelps is a resident of Los Alamos, but he said the board also consists of people from Santa Fe, Taos, Espanola and a number of smaller communities in the

northern part of the state. The board is politically neutral when it comes to broader nuclear issues.
“We don’t really get into the pros and cons,” he said. “What we’re really looking at is the ability of the labs to clean up some of their old waste that’s left over. And much of the waste contains radioactive products.”
Phelps said the group’s interests include closure options for an area at LANL called Material Disposal Area G — which includes transuranic waste.
Phelps noted that WIPP contains two types of waste — remote handled and contact handled.
“We’re looking to see how they differentiate between the two and the complexity that’s involved in this,” he said.
On Wednesday, members of the voluntary board received an orientation and safety class to prepare them for their trip underground.
Phelps said the board periodically meets with LANL officials, with a focus on the activities they have working toward the New Mexico Environment Department’s consent order, which requires lab cleanup by 2015.
Board members also hold formal and informal meetings with members of northern New Mexico communities to explain ongoing issues and obtain feedback.
“We’re probably going to raise a lot of technical and communication questions today,” Phelps said before the tour Thursday morning. “One of the values of seeing the operation down here is that when we go back home and interact with the public we’ll be a little bit smarter in explaining how they handle this.”
The Northern New Mexico Citizen’s Advisory Board’s mission is to increase public involvement, awareness and education relating to environmental remediation activities at LANL. One of the board’s top issues this fall will be to see LANL waste shipments to WIPP increase.
The board has taken a recent stand related to WIPP by recommending the approval of allowing shielded containers for handling and disposing of a portion of the remote-handled waste inventory.
Shielded containers would be placed on the floor of the repository in the same fashion as contact-handled containers. Shielded containers would increase handling efficiency and transportation capacity, which would speed up the removal of waste from LANL, according to the recommendation.
Currently, remote handled waste is placed into the walls of the repository panels.
In the past, the board has also called on the Department of Energy to expedite the removal of transuranic waste from LANL.

http://www.currentargus.com/ci_10208418