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Nuclear Reactions: The Politics of Opening a Radioactive Waste Disposal Site
Chuck McCutcheon
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002
248 pp., $24.95, hardcover, ISBN 0-8263-2209-3 (cloth)

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This book is a journalistic analysis of 30 years of the actions and people that played important roles in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the world's first nuclear waste repository -- or "the most elaborate landfill built to date," as Chuck McCutcheon puts it. He writes: "The purpose of this book is neither to advocate nor oppose WIPP. Instead it aims to shed some light on the protracted process that gave birth to and nurtured the project through three decades' worth of successes and setbacks." Because more nuclear waste is generated each day, the political, legal, technical, and emotional issues associated with WIPP are played out as other sites are proposed and opposed.

Reactions to putting transuranic (plutonium-contaminated) waste more than 2,000 feet underground in southeastern New Mexico is the dominant theme of Nuclear Reactions. In 1971, State Senator Joe Gant from Carlsbad first thought to ask federal officials to consider his community for nuclear waste disposal after Kansas politicians opposed the site chosen near Lyons, Kansas. The motivation of Carlsbad's political and economic leaders was to get jobs and federal money. The town had long before "developed a knack for self-promotion," as the author puts it, from changing its name to promote itself as a health resort in 1899, to boosting Carlsbad Caverns as a national monument in the 1920s, to dominating the nation's potash mining in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. So becoming "the waste disposal capital of the United States," as then U.S. Representative Harold Runnels put it, seemed almost obvious after the area was introduced to things nuclear with Project Gnome, a site about 25 miles from Carlsbad, where in 1961 a five-kiloton bomb was exploded as part of the federal government's efforts to promote "peaceful" uses for nuclear energy.

While federal officials always found support for WIPP in Carlsbad, and usually from the state's U.S. senators and representatives, the book also describes other reactions that delayed WIPP's opening from the early 1980s until 1999. They included controversies between President Carter and Congress over whether WIPP should receive commercial, as well as military waste; conflicts in the 1980s over technical concerns about geologic disposal; the lack of accepted regulatory requirements over the Department of Energy (DOE) which has a history of massive contamination at its sites which required Congress to pass a new federal law for WIPP in 1992; and the role of the federal courts in preventing WIPP's opening in 1991 and allowing it in 1999.

McCutcheon highlights various important events, including Rep. Mel Price's 1979 law to authorize WIPP as a military waste project, not subject to New Mexico veto or Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing; then New Mexico Attorney General Jeff Bingaman's 1981 decision to settle his lawsuit to allow WIPP's construction to begin; and the 1991 lawsuit that prevented DOE from opening WIPP. The author also states that DOE's 1993 decision to drop its plans to put waste into WIPP for "tests" before meeting regulatory requirements "probably enabled WIPP to move forward in much the same way that the Energy-New Mexico agreements of earlier years staved off protracted federal-state battles. The move certainly headed off litigation that could have led to delays and, in the eyes of some officials, shut down the project."

As a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal from 1986 to 1995, Chuck McCutcheon covered WIPP and the people involved. He subsequently interviewed others, and quotations from dozens of people (including this reviewer) enliven the book. The well-footnoted and indexed book effectively summarizes the history, major issues, and some of the personalities involved with WIPP, and should be read not only by those involved with WIPP, but by people interested in environmental policy.

However, three important aspects of WIPP are ignored or underemphasized. First, the corporate influence on politicians is ignored, and Westinghouse, WIPP's operating contractor, gets only three brief mentions that do not reflect its influence on political and legal decisions or its efforts to manipulate public opinion. Such influence is even more important for dumps that include commercial waste. Second, while the political pressure on scientists of the National Academy of Sciences to "support" WIPP is described at some points, the unwillingness of its proponents to allow truly independent scientists to critically look at WIPP (and to attack them when they raised scientific concerns) is not sufficiently reported. That lack of full scientific investigation is a fundamental reason for the continuing opposition to WIPP and will be a vital element to the public's view of future waste dumps. Third, while federal-state conflicts are a recurring theme, the fundamentally undemocratic nature of decisionmaking about WIPP and other nuclear waste dumps is not discussed. Public opinion opposing WIPP (or even stronger opposition of Nevadans to Yucca Mountain) is not reflected in elections or political decisions in Washington, which also serves to undermine public confidence in nuclear enterprises.

-- Don Hancock

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