For 10 years, the Department of Energy's half-mile-deep subterranean nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico has been ready for business, but legal challenges and bureaucratic rigmarole have prevented the WIPP site (for Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) from opening. Now, with the EPA about to bestow its blessing, the DOE is gearing up to begin receiving plutonium refuse from the nation's mothballed bomb factories. With activists vowing legal action, that's no sure thing. Though officials insist that concerns about everything from fractures to flooding have been addressed, opponents still question the safety of shipping millions of pounds of radioactive waste along the interstates...
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