LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) -- The nation's first nuclear waste repository is ready for its inaugural shipment after 25 years of studies, protests and lawsuits -- if the weather allows it.
A truck loaded with radioactive waste was delayed by fog early Thursday.The tractor-trailer toting three huge stainless steel containers must travel 270 miles from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to an underground dump in the salt beds of southern New Mexico.
It's the first of about 37,000 shipments expected to fill storage rooms and become entombed by salt over the next 30 years. The trip to the $1.8 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad was expected to take about eight hours.
Protests were expected along the way. About 40 miles south of Los Alamos, in Santa Fe, about 60 protesters were waiting along a highway bypass.
"I couldn't be sleeping when the first truck went by after all this struggle," said Richard Johnson, who 11 years ago formed Business Against WIPP. The group is no longer active.
"In the beginning, it seemed pretty hopeless we could stop the U.S. government," he said. "But we did for a while."
Another protester, Mavis Belisle, drove more than four hours from Amarillo, Texas.
"This isn't a New Mexico problem. It's a national problem," she said. "We're afraid of the whole region being a nuclear waste disposal area."
Excavated in ancient salt beds nearly half a mile below the ground, WIPP will contain clothing, gloves, tools and other material contaminated with plutonium. The waste is from sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina and Washington.
The Energy Department maintains everything possible has been done to ensure safety. Critics contend brine pockets make the site unsuitable since brine could allow radioactivity to rise to the surface.
Plans to store low-level nuclear waste in the salt beds around Carlsbad began in 1974. Because salt creeps, it is expected that any buried waste would be encapsulated within a few years.