14 DAY TRIAL // About a week and a half ago, on February 16, the Department of Energy in the United States went public with the news that excessive radiation levels had been detected at a waste site in New Mexico.
The site where these elevated radiation levels were detected is dubbed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and currently serves as a repository for transuranic waste.
For those unaware, transuranic waste is material contaminated with radioactive elements whose atomic number's higher than that of uranium.
Recent news on the topic says that, since February 14, when they spiked most likely as a result of a leak, local radiation levels at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant have been steadily decreasing.
According to Nature, this indicates that, even if a leak was indeed the cause of the spike in radiation, the site must have experienced just one release of contamination.
If this were not the case, odds are that, instead of dropping at a steady pace, radiation levels at this waste site would have registered several fluctuations over the course of the past few days.
The same source tells us that, due to the fact that at the time when excessive radioactivity was detected inside this nuclear waste storage facility all workers were above ground, it is still unclear how and why the contamination occurred.
As previously reported, nuclear waste stored at this facility is buried in underground salt formations. These formations keep it safe and isolate it from the rest of the world.
Talking to the press, Russel Hardy with the Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center at the New Mexico State University, said that the contamination might have been the result of a damage done to one of the metal storage containers.
Thus, it is possible that one of these containers got hit by salt falling from the ceiling of the repository, and that this caused a leak to occur, Russel Hardy further detailed.
“Until they get underground and find out what happened, it’s really all just speculation at this point,” the specialist nonetheless wished to stress.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant's operators say that, although some contamination made it out of the facility, the public has nothing to worry about. This is because levels are low and, therefore, do not constitute a threat to public health.
This nuclear waste site in New Mexico became operational in 1999. Since then, it has taken in over 80,000 cubic meters of material contaminated with radioactive elements.