New Mexico regulators worry about US plans to ship radioactive waste back from Texas

By SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN
Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Top officials were gathering Tuesday in southern New Mexico to mark the 25th anniversary of the nation’s only underground repository for radioactive waste. The nuclear pollution came from decades of research and bomb making. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant has taken in around 13,850 shipments from more than a dozen U.S. laboratories and military and defense industry sites. New Mexico officials are raising safety concerns about federal plans to repackage and return hundreds of drums that contain the same kind of materials that prompted a radiation release at the repository in 2014. The drums have been sitting in West Texas for close to a decade now.