New Mexico governor, Energy Department sideways on nuclear waste disposal

Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is at odds with the US Department of Energy who seems to believe transporting diluted nuclear waste over and over America's highways is completely harmless. 

A nuclear waste dump would make southeast New Mexico a sacrifice zone that amounts to “nuclear colonialism," according to Leona Morgan, a Dine woman and organizer with the Nuclear Issues Study Group.

Santa Fe-area activists and residents have been sounding the alarm that more nuclear waste shipments will soon be traveling through the county on their way to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant—the nation’s only long-term storage facility for transuranic radioactive waste, located near Carlsbad. While the US Department of Energy is not exactly forthcoming about the future, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham says such expansion would be limited to the capacity of state vehicle inspections. Her “biggest concern,” Nora Meyers Sackett, the spokeswoman, says, is that the US Department of Energy “continues to prioritize shipments from other states to...WIPP while failing to expedite cleanup of waste at Los Alamos” National Laboratory. Under the “dilute and dispose” plan, surplus plutonium would be transported from the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas, to LANL, where it would be turned into an oxide powder. The powder would then be shipped to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where it would be further diluted before returning to New Mexico. [Santa Fe Reporter]