For what it accomplished, this $172 million in federal stimulus money might as well have been tossed down a deep hole in the ground.
That’s essentially what happened to the Department of Energy’s effort to boost shipments to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad. Some of the money went to create jobs over a three-year period — for about 400 workers to prepare and ship radioactive waste — but if failed miserably in its ultimate goal, to increase the shipment rate from 19 truckloads of nuclear waste per week to 35, with the ability to occasionally “surge” to 41 shipments per week from various waste sites. The stimulus money spent in 2009-2011 also paid for trucks, construction work, administrative costs and other expenses. In the end, according to an Energy Department investigation, the shipment rate was 31 percent below the level promised and hit the 35-per-week mark only twice between May 2009 and December 2010. The DOE report did not say how many of the jobs were created in New Mexico, or how many were at sites around the country where waste awaits shipment. At the end of the day, workers got paid and contracts got funded, but not much got accomplished. And once again, the Obama administration’s much-touted stimulus program failed to deliver on anything except handing out cash. Typically, the DOE goes to Congress asking for a certain level of funding with a pledge of a certain level of performance. But for years the program has failed to meet waste shipment goals laid out in its annual congressional budget requests. The nation sorely needs to safely store radioactive nuclear waste. Since 1999, the WIPP site, a 2,150-foot-deep salt mine, has been a viable solution for storing plutonium-contaminated waste from nuclear weapons design and manufacturing. With the nation’s soaring debt and the need to cut government spending, lame excuses about needing adequate staff on hand to handle the elusive “maximum planned capacity” for disposal operations and stonewalling in response to requests for information about shipment rates, budgets and detailed job numbers just aren’t good enough anymore. Accountability is lacking in this program that keeps its hand out for more funding. For sure, care is needed in preparing the waste and shipping it safely to WIPP, but the DOE needs to come up with a realistic plan for stepping up shipments or quit making promises it can’t keep to secure more federal dollars. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.
