Perspective: Nuclear graveyardThe U.S. Wants to Bury SC’s Plutonium Stockpile Forever. Its New Home Isn’t Sure It Wants It.
How long will it take for weapons-grade plutonium stockpile, temporarily stored at the South Carolina’s Savanah River nuclear weapons complex, to decay, that it, to have its radioactivity reduced to a level at which it will no longer pose radiation risks or turned into nuclear weapons? About seven billion years, or a little more than double the age of planet Earth. The government’s plutonium plan calls for expanding a nuclear waste burial ground located inside an abandoned salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which is known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP. But New Mexico objects.
How long will it take for South Carolina’s stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium to decay, that it, to have its radioactivity reduced to a level at which it will no longer pose radiation risks or turned into nuclear weapons? About seven billion years, or a little more than double the age of planet Earth.
Thad Moore writes in The Post and Courier that the U.S. government will, in the next few years, decide where the plutonium will spend that eternity. It will then ask one state to house thousands of barrels filled with scraps of the Cold War and the U.S.-USSR nuclear arms race.
Moore writes:
That question will soon be posed to New Mexico, where the U.S. Department of Energy has excavated cavernous vaults deep below the ruddy soil in the state’s southeastern corner. The government hopes it will eventually hold tons of plutonium it has decided it no longer needs — enough to build a few thousand bombs the size of the one dropped over Nagasaki, Japan.
If New Mexico says yes, the Energy Department will bury some 20,000 steel drums deep underground there, in a ribbon of salt as thick as Charleston’s Ashley River is wide.
If it says yes, trucks will carry the plutonium load by load down Interstate 20 for the next three decades, and workers will lower it almost half a mile underground, where it will await its final fate: the mine’s slow collapse, and salt entombing it forever.
And if New Mexico says yes, South Carolina will secure a new home for a nuclear stockpile it was wary of taking in the first place.
The problem is, New Mexico isn’t sure if it will say yes.
The government’s plutonium plan calls for expanding a nuclear waste burial ground located inside an abandoned salt mine near Carlsbad, New Mexico, which is known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP. But New Mexico objects.
