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Military Plutonium Waste: Government Eyes More Poisons, Increased Storage, and Extended License at New Mexico Dump

Drums of waste in WIPP’s deep Panel 7, site of the 2014 barrel explosion, sealed on Oct. 22, 2022. (Carlsbad Current-Argus, Oct. 25, 2022)
By Lindsay Potter

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP), in Carlsbad, New Mexico, opened in 1999 as the only long-term storage facility designed to entomb radioactive nuclear weapons waste for 10,000 years in ancient salt bed caverns excavated 2,000 feet below ground. However, in February 2014, an improperly packed drum self-heated to 1,600 degrees and exploded, spewing uranium, plutonium, and americium throughout 30,000 cubic meters and into the ventilation shaft, which failed to contain the poison air. The calamity caused a three-year shutdown, left at least 22 workers internally exposed to plutonium radiation, and potentially exposed another 140 people working on the surface. The lack of oversight cost tax-payers $2 billion in clean-up and another $73 million in fines the New Mexico Environmental Department (NMED) levied on the Department of Energy (DOE) — though the money went to improve infrastructure in and around WIPP rather than to local constituents affected by the release. Nuclear Waste Partners (NWP), the DOE’s contractor running the site, was docked a mere $1 million off its multi-million dollar annual incentive, paid by the federal government above the cost of operating the site. WIPP receives shipments of transuranic waste from 22 locations around the country, mostly plutonium-contaminated gloves, tools, and equipment from Cold-war era weapons production. However, the DOE is considering expanding WIPP’s capacity, operations, and timeline to include storage of private commercial nuclear wastes and surplus plutonium.

WIPP’s re-opening was plagued with mishaps — including releases of contaminated air, roof collapses, and dozens of permit violations — but resulted in no penalties. Regardless, the EPA deemed WIPP compliant in July 2017, and the DOE promised a $2 million reopening bonus, dangling another $2.1 million for meeting performance milestones. The facility resumed full operations in 2021. In October, Panel 7, a radioactively contaminated work space sitting open since 2014, was filled and sealed with a 100-foot thick layer of salt sandwiched between two steel bulkheads. In November, workers loaded the first barrels, from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, into Panel 8, the final-permitted panel.

Poor Performance, Perpetual Problems

Despite precedent, on February 26, 2021, improperly packed pyrophoric materials caused a waste drum to spark and, throughout 2022, WIPP faced a slew of further accidents, failures to comply, and unanticipated shutdowns, rendering the number of received shipments nearly fifty percent short of productivity goals.

In August, Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was forced to stop shipments to WIPP for two months while the NMED investigated issues at the waste handling bay, including several containers from INL with radioactive surface substances or elevated internal radioactivity, some of which were sent back to Idaho.

Multiple unplanned maintenance issues stalled work, including a September shutdown to assess the waste hoist’s brake pads. However, while the hoist was not operating, NWP changed specifications for the equipment, and work resumed days later.

On October 10, WIPP’s air monitors tripped. Tests found radon on air filters from radium-226, released by decaying uranium, likely from gas vented from containers as waste breaks down. Radon gas is the greatest cause of lung cancer among non-smokers according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Two months earlier, on August 9, NMED logged a shipment from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) missing vent filters necessary to contain particulate matter.

Sixty More Years of Waste Production

The DOE applied to renew its 10-year permit with requests to add two new panels and remove WIPP’s 2024 closure date, leaving its operational timeline open-ended. While the NMED reviews the application, Santa Fe locals are pushing back against a new plan to bury surplus plutonium at WIPP. The proposal would send plutonium across the country, some 1,500 miles each way, from LANL to the Savannah River Site to be diluted and then back for burial at WIPP.

Yet the DOE digs deeper to find further sources of waste for WIPP’s coffers. The Government Accountability Office reported on September 29 that WIPP is the “preferred alternative” dumping ground for “greater than Class C (GTCC)” waste — “commercial low-level nuclear waste from decommissioned reactors or unused medical or industrial equipment” (Carlsbad Current-Argus). Projections through 2083 estimate the DOE will accumulate 12,000 cubic meters of this and other “GTCC-like” wastes, neither of which has a current legal pathway for disposal. The DOE may “assume responsibility” for radioactive waste generated by private companies and use taxpayer money to bury it deep in the salt caverns, so the commercial nuclear industry can continue to rake in profits without concern for how to handle its legacy of contamination. Ultimately, the DOE is awaiting approval by Congress as federal law may not allow government custody of the waste.

These new projects could drive WIPP operations indefinitely, with the facility presently under half its statutory 6.2 million cubic foot capacity. However, the nine new storage panels needed to hold this quantity would require additional permitting by the NMED.

— Associated Press, Nov. 26; Carlsbad Current-Argus, Nov. 2, Oct. 25, Oct. 24, Oct. 14, and Oct. 13, 2022

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John’s Letter from Jail – January 15, 2023

Sent by Marion Küpker and typed by Felice Cohen-Joppa.

January 15, 2023

This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously toward the court system here and have refused to cooperate with its deeply corrupt and thoroughly dishonest protection of the nuclear weapons establishment.

Because Susan Crane and I had the gall to occupy the top of a nuclear weapons bunker that holds U.S. hydrogen bombs here in Germany, and then refuse to apologize by paying a fine for trespassing, the court has decided that seven weeks in this modern prison ought to mend my ways, or at least discourage other abolitionists.

The three war-weary events are Martin Luther King Day, January 16; the second anniversary of the Entry into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, January 22; and the yearly setting of the “Doomsday Clock,” January 24 – that weirdly formulaic gauge of nuclear armageddon’s likelihood concocted by a group of scientific nuclear eggheads.

The establishment of the MLK holiday and of the TPNW were both monumental achievements made against fierce, wealthy, bigoted and colonialist forces of reaction. Advocates of nonviolent action and campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons this Monday and next Sunday, then get back to work Tuesday when the alarm goes off again on the Doomsday Clock. Of course the clock’s “up one year, down the next” assessment of nuclear war risks has been ignored as a worn out rewrite of the Chicken Little tale. Yet the five metric tons of plutonium dust that was lofted into the upper atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests is all making its way back down to earth. So yes Mr. Watson, in fact the worst part of the sky is falling.

Dr. King and opposition to nuclear weapons will always be connected in my mind because MLK said, “We have guided missiles and misguided men” and “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and because nuclear weapons are nothing if not genocidal.

Dr. King’s books, and the hard-won triumphs of the fearlessly nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, inspired a group of us in the 1980s to repeatedly blockade the entrance to the Grand Forks air force base in North Dakota which then controlled 150 land-based, long-range nuclear-armed missiles. Over a ten-year period, our band of nuclear resisters served enough county jail time after staging so many marches, protests and stunts – once pouring blood across the 100-ton concrete lid of a locked-and-loaded Minuteman III missile silo – that when the air force later decided to eliminate over half of its land-based missiles, the Grand Forks nukes were some of the first to go.

Our small group efforts were encouraged back then by news of hundreds of thousands across Europe who took to the streets demanding – successfully it turned out – the ouster of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles. Any prospective use of the weapons was almost universally viewed in Europe as suicidal. 

We never know if our demands will be realized — only that nothing is gained without venturing. Anti-nuclear marchers in the ‘80s never guessed they’d see the U.N. General Assembly vote 122-to-3 to endorse a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have agreed that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, that any chance of a successful medical response to their effects is impossible, that these effects would illegally cross neutral borders, do long-term criminal damage to the environment, and then recoil to maim and destroy the very militaries that unleash them. (That’s why I wrote “B61 = Suicide” on the weapons bunker just before being detained.)

Today, the groundbreaking TPNW has permanently shamed and stigmatized the nuclear weapons states as hypocrites, scofflaws and rogues who ridicule and ignore the treaty’s means, while cynically claiming to desire its ends.

The nine-member thermonuclear cartel, like a gang of coldblooded mobsters, acts outside and above the law by rewarding their judicial, police and prison authorities for the cover they provide, authorities who then wink and pretend that the protection racket is necessary and that the Bomb is legal.

Maybe our marching, our rebellion and the law of nations can’t denuclearize the cabal of atomic weaponeers. Maybe the nuclear mobsters won’t re-direct their war chests to useful purposes before they run our earthly train off the rails. But then nothing changes unless we demand it.

John LaForge
Billwerder Prison, Hamburg

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John’s Jail Updates – RELEASED!

John LaForge at an anti-war rally during work release 3 days before his final release from prison for nuclear weapons actions in Germany.

Nukewatch’s John LaForge was released from Glasmoor Prison in Hamburg, Germany on February 28, 2023 as planned after completing his 50-day sentence for his part in actions aimed at removing US nuclear weapons from Germany. Learn more about the campaign to remove US nuclear weapons from Germany HERE.

Read John’s letter after being released HERE.

John LaForge entering Billwerder prison in Germany on January 10, 2023 (Photo by Marion Küpker)
Read John’s first letter from jail January 15.
February 22, 2023

John was able to celebrate his birthday in prison, with a balloon and all. He shared herring with his cellmates and received many birthday wishes in the mail which were much appreciated.

February 14, 2023

John is doing well. He has 2 weeks left of incarceration. You can still send mail since it has only been taking 7-8 days to reach him from the U.S., especially since his birthday will be coming up February 22.  He is still being released on weekends making it all more tolerable.


January 30, 2023

Today the German group Nonviolent Action Abolish Nuclear Weapons sent an open letter to the German Constitutional Court (signed by 77 people) to demand the acceptance of John’s constitutional complaint to review the illegality under international law of the US nuclear bombs stationed in Germany.

Read the press release.

Read the letter of support from retired judge Bernd Hahnfeld, board member of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms


January 28, 2023

John emailed the Nukewatch office during his first full 32-hour ‘work release’ day outside the Glasmoor prison camp. He went to the Cotton Club for a wonderful Jazz concert with friends.

He wrote to make sure we were doing our work spell-checking and proofreading. He mentioned that a friend had recently come across a letter he had written February 14, 1983, from solitary confinement in Leavenworth Federal Correctional Institution! He wrote, “after 40 years of this, I don’t have anything to prove any more. It’s like my friend Jeff always says: ‘You have to start young if you’re going to stick it out.'”

John is able to make daily phone calls out within Germany, so we know he is doing well. From now on every weekend John will be allowed to leave every Friday at 3pm and has to be back in prison on Sunday afternoon. His release date is February 28 so you still have time to write him a letter at the address above.

 

January 24, 2023

At the Nukewatch office we received a poem for John from Sharon Cody a Nukewatch supporter.

I hope you like this little spoof-
A tribute to my favorite goof:
Enjoy your 50-day vacation
But keep alive your dedication
To the cause we both desire-
That Earth avoids a full-on fire
Caused by dropping bombs galore,
Thus ending life forevermore.

January 22, 2023

Hooray! John LaForge was given an unexpected 10-hour furlough today from the JVA Glasmoor Prison and was able to participate in the Nuclear Ban Treaty festivities at the Hamburg City Hall.

Out of Jail for a Day Celebrating the 2nd Anniversary of the Nuclear Ban Treaty!
Photo by Hinrich Schultze

January 21, 2023

John welcomed his first visitors in prison today, his wife Marion Küpker (also spokewoman for the campaign “Büchel is everywhere! Nuclear-weapons free now!”) and brother-in-law Gerrit Küpker, where they found him in good condition. He will sit in the prison a little over one month longer. He is happily receiving about 15 letters each day and looks forward to receiving more mail.

A voice recording of John was played at the European Regional Meeting of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (watch for a future upload of the video). In the recording he praised the passing of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons(TPNW) and condemned the international law breaking by the United States and Germany in their nuclear-sharing agreement that violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Nuremburg Principles, and the TPNW.

January 18, 2023

John already received very early mailings from Canada and the US. He is in good condition and shares a cell with two men at the new prison where he has a shower room that is always available. They also have their own refrigerator and can make their own tea and coffee throughout the day. His nickname in prison is “Greenpeace.”

January 17, 2023

Today John was moved to a halfway prison “Glasmoor.” His new address is: John LaForge, JVA Glasmoor, Am Glasmoor 99, 22852 Norderstedt, Germany. He will also receive the mail going to the former prison, but this always takes extra time.

He was able to make a phone call out today. In this new prison he finally received all his books and vitamin and mineral supplements that he took in with his personal luggage.

January 10, 2023

A vigil with 24 people accompanied John to prison today. He was also allowed to call out of the prison a few hours after entering to say he was fine and that he will be sent in a halfway prison next week, which is in northern Hamburg and much nicer: big garden and free movement in the garden until midnight…

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American Activist Enters German Prison for Protesting U.S. Nuclear Weapons Based There

Right before John enters the prison (Photo by Marion Küpker)

Amidst heightened nuclear tension between NATO and Russia in Europe, U.S. peace activist John LaForge entered a German prison on January 10, 2023 to serve jail time there for protests against U.S. nuclear weapons stockpiled at Germany’s Büchel Air Force Base, 80 miles southeast of Cologne. LaForge entered JVA Billwerder in Hamburg as the first American ever imprisoned for a nuclear weapons protest in Germany.

24 people attended a vigil outside prison before John began his sentence (Photo by Marion Küpker)
The 66-year-old Minnesota native and co-director of Nukewatch, the Wisconsin-based advocacy and action group, was convicted of trespass in Cochem District Court for joining in two “go-in” actions at the German airbase in 2018. One of the actions involved entering the base and climbing atop a bunker that likely housed some of the approximately twenty U.S. B61 thermonuclear gravity bombs stationed there.
Germany’s Regional Court in Koblenz affirmed his conviction and lowered the penalty from €1,500 to €600 ($619) or 50 “daily rates”, which translates to 50 days incarceration. LaForge has refused to pay* and has appealed the convictions to Germany’s Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, the country’s highest, which has not yet ruled in the case.
John speaks outside of the prison before the start of his sentence (Photo by Marion Küpker)

In the appeal, LaForge argues that both the District Court in Cochem and the Regional Court in Koblenz erred by refusing to consider his defense of “crime prevention,” thereby violating his right to present a defense.

Before entering prison, LaForge said: “U.S. and German Air Force plans and preparations, currently ongoing, to use the nuclear weapons stationed here in Germany are a criminal conspiracy to commit massacres with radiation and firestorms. The court authorities in this case have prosecuted the wrong suspects.”

Both courts ruled against hearing from expert witnesses who had volunteered to explain the international treaties that prohibit any planning for mass destruction. In addition, the appeal argues, Germany’s stationing of the U.S. nuclear weapons is a violation of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which explicitly forbids any transfer of nuclear weapons between countries that are parties to the treaty, including both the U.S. and Germany.

Prison address

(note that it takes two weeks for mail to arrive from the U.S.)

JVA Glasmoor

Am Glasmoor 99

22852 Norderstedt

Germany

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Prison reflections by U.S. nuclear resister John LaForge

~ from Billwerder Prison, Hamburg — Posted by The Nuclear Resister January 19, 2023 ~ January 15, 2023

At left, volunteer attorney Anna Busl of Bonn represented LaForge at trial in Koblenz.

This month has three important political anniversaries, anti-war and anti-nuclear holidays if you will, events I’ll celebrate privately for a change, since I’m temporarily cooling my heels in a German prison on the west end of Hamburg. It’s not that I killed or robbed very many people, but I have acted contemptuously toward the court system here and have refused to cooperate with its deeply corrupt and thoroughly dishonest protection of the nuclear weapons establishment.

Because Susan Crane and I had the gall to occupy the top of a nuclear weapons bunker that holds U.S. hydrogen bombs here in Germany, and then refuse to apologize by paying a fine for trespassing, the court has decided that seven weeks in this modern prison ought to mend my ways, or at least discourage other abolitionists.

The three war-weary events are Martin Luther King Day, January 16; the second anniversary of the Entry into Force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, January 22; and the yearly setting of the “Doomsday Clock”, January 24 — that weirdly formulaic gauge of nuclear Armageddon’s likelihood concocted by a group of scientific nuclear eggheads.

LaForge, wearing ‘Weapons Inspector’ sign, and Susan Crane , behind light post, were detained after their ‘go-in’ action Aug. 6, 2018, and later convicted of trespass and damage to property.

The establishment of the MLK holiday and of the TPNW were both monumental achievements made against fierce, wealthy, bigoted and colonialist forces of reaction. Advocates of nonviolent action and campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons this Monday and next Sunday, then get back to work Tuesday when the alarm goes off again on the Doomsday Clock. Of course, the clock’s “up one year, down the next” assessment of nuclear war risks has been ignored as a worn-out rewrite of the Chicken Little tale. Yet the five metric tons of plutonium dust that was lofted into the upper atmosphere by nuclear weapons tests is all making its way back down to earth. So yes Mr. Watson, in fact the worst part of the sky is falling.

Dr. King and opposition to nuclear weapons will always be connected in my mind because MLK said, “We have guided missiles and misguided men” and “the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” and because nuclear weapons are nothing if not genocidal.

Dr. King’s books, and the hard-won triumphs of the fearlessly nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, inspired a group of us in the 1980s to repeatedly blockade the entrance to the Grand Forks air force base in North Dakota which then controlled 150 land-based, long-range nuclear-armed missiles. Over a ten-year period, our band of nuclear resisters served enough county jail time after staging so many marches, protests and stunts – once pouring blood across the 100-ton concrete lid of a locked-and-loaded Minuteman III missile silo – that when the air force later decided to eliminate over half of its land-based missiles, the Grand Forks nukes were some of the first to go.

Our small group efforts were encouraged back then by news of hundreds of thousands across Europe who took to the streets demanding — successfully it turned out — the ouster of U.S. Cruise and Pershing missiles. Any prospective use of the weapons was almost universally viewed in Europe as suicidal.

We never know if our demands will be realized only that nothing is gained without venturing. Anti-nuclear marchers in the ‘80s never guessed they’d see the U.N. General Assembly vote 122-to-3 to endorse a treaty banning nuclear weapons. This overwhelming majority of the world’s governments have agreed that nuclear weapons can only produce massacres, that any chance of a successful medical response to their effects is impossible, that these effects would illegally cross neutral borders, do long-term criminal damage to the environment, and then recoil to maim and destroy the very militaries that unleash them. (That’s why I wrote “B61 = Suicide” on the weapons bunker just before being detained.)

Today, the groundbreaking TPNW has permanently shamed and stigmatized the nuclear weapons states as hypocrites, scofflaws and rogues who ridicule and ignore the treaty’s means, while cynically claiming to desire its ends.

The nine-member thermonuclear cartel, like a gang of coldblooded mobsters, acts outside and above the law by rewarding their judicial, police and prison authorities for the cover they provide, authorities who then wink and pretend that the protection racket is necessary and that the Bomb is legal.

Maybe our marching, our rebellion and the law of nations can’t denuclearize the cabal of atomic weaponeers. Maybe the nuclear mobsters won’t re-direct their war chests to useful purposes before they run our earthly train off the rails. But then nothing changes unless we demand it.

— John LaForge, Billwerder Prison, Hamburg GERMANY

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