Teams set to inspect New Mexico nuclear waste site after leak

By Joseph L. Kolb ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (Reuters) - Inspection teams were set to venture into an underground nuclear waste disposal vault in New Mexico on Wednesday to look for the source of a radiation leak nearly seven weeks ago that exposed 21 workers and forced a shutdown of the facility. The planned inspection would mark the first time since the mishap that workers have been sent deep into the salt caverns of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where drums of plutonium-tainted refuse from nuclear weapons factories and laboratories are buried. Located about 25 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Chihuahuan Desert, the facility is the nation's only permanent repository for the U.S. government's stockpile of nuclear waste, much of it left over from the Cold War era. Although an alarm automatically switched the ventilation system to filtration to keep radiation from spreading, trace amounts of manmade isotopes such as americium-241, a byproduct of nuclear weapons manufacturing, were measured at the surface.



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