Los Alamos resumes nuke waste shipments
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) — Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is under a tight deadline to get nuclear waste off its northern New Mexico campus before wildfire season peaks this summer, has begun trucking the remainder of the waste to Texas.
Los Alamos and Department of Energy officials say the first shipments arrived at a commercial nuclear waste dump in Andrews County in West Texas on Tuesday.
Removal of the waste was halted in February after a truck fire and radiation leak shuttered indefinitely the federal government's underground nuclear waste dump in southeastern New Mexico. But federal officials last month reached an agreement to temporarily move the waste to Waste Control Specialists.
The state of New Mexico pressured Los Alamos to get the material off a mesa following a massive 2011 wildfire that lapped at the edges of lab property.
