
Addressing the elephant in the desert, an official with the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Wednesday warned that ongoing nuclear-weapons maintenance this century will require a transuranic waste disposal site that’s open beyond 2050: the current, best-case availability for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. “From an NNSA perspective, with an enduring mission, we are going to continue to have a need to dispose of transuranic waste past 2050,” James McConnell, the DoE agency’s…