10 years since “impossible” WIPP leak

[Image of smoke billowing from the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a repository for nuclear weapons complex transuranic waste) underground in February 2014. This industrial fire — caused by an unmaintained vehicle in the underground — led to a mass evacuation of underground WIPP workers. Around two-dozen were hospitalized due to smoke inhalation, including one worker who was permanently disabled. However, had this fire not happened, the transuranic waste barrel fire and explosion, on Valentine’s Day, 2014, could have had much more devastating consequences for workers’ health — otherwise a large number of workers in the WIPP underground, not wearing respiratory protection, could have suffered concentrated inhalation doses of alpha particle emitters, such as plutonium isotopes. Even with the WIPP underground evacuated of workers due to the industrial fire just days earlier, around two-dozen workers at the surface were nonetheless exposed to alpha particle inhalation doses. Exposure to even microscopic amounts of plutonium in the human lung significantly increases the risk of lung cancer over time.]

Here is an announcement by Robin Seydel, a decades-long watch-dog on the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico:

Dear Friends,

I am hoping you will help us memorialize the 10th Anniversary of the explosion at WIPP that leaked radioactive materials into the environment.

It was the accident that was never supposed to happen!

Now they are planning another 5 decades of WIPP operations. How many accidents will New Mexican’s have to endure?

We are planning a fun and heartfelt action at the Roundhouse [New Mexico State Capitol] on Valentines’s day. Details are below and in the attached file. [see links to flyer, below]

Please join us on 2/14 and help
STOP FOREVER WIPP and the WIPP EXPANSION.

Hope to see you there.
love
Robin
PS please also help spread the word to friends, family and neighbors!

Cynthia Weehler, a leader of the 285 Alliance, has shared the following flyer about the Valentine’s Day event at the New Mexico Roundhouse (State Capitol).

Flyer, Page 1;

Flyer, Page 2.

See the STOP FOREVER WIPP! website for more information.