A Livelihood in Nuclear Waste, Under Threat

By Dan Frosch, The New York Times

For 15 years, workers from this dusty New Mexico town have made the 26-mile drive down a series of worn two-lane highways until reaching a strange complex of alabaster buildings in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert.

These days, though, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nation’s only permanent underground repository for nuclear weapons waste, is closed. The plant has been shut down ever since a mysterious leak exposed 17 employees to radiation on Feb. 14 … more