Radiation safety

Nation's only underground nuclear waste repository reopens

Workers at the USA's only underground nuclear waste repository stowed two pallets of drums deep underground Wednesday for the first time in nearly three years.

Since 1999, the U.S. Department of Energy's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, about 25 miles east of Carlsbad, has been storing transuranic nuclear waste left over from weapons research and testing in 16 square miles of salt caves more than a third of a mile underground.

But a section of the plant was contaminated in February 2014 because one canister of waste from Los Alamos National Laboratory about 55 miles of Albuquerque ruptured in one of the storage rooms. More than 20 workers also were contaminated, and the plant that had almost 150 workers at the time was forced to close.