WIPP Lash

Twenty-five miles southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, and just north of the Texas border, lies a 10,000-acre plot of desert land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This is no ordinary piece of real estate: Far underground, nearly 2,150 feet below the scrub brush and cactus, is an enormous excavated network of salt bed tunnels slated to become the holding grounds for 850,000 55-gallon drums of radioactive nuclear weapons' waste.

The $2 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), scheduled to accept the nation's plutonium-contaminated trash as early as May 1998, has been mired in controversy for the past 20 years and faces one final hurdle: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approval. Last May, the DOE signed a statement claiming that WIPP complies with all EPA regulations, and in August it submitted an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). If the EPA approves the application (and a draft compliance order was issued in October), then WIPP will open.

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