Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Permit???

April 23, 2026 By Bob Kinsey

The New Mexico Environment Department is issuing a new state permit for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. https://www.env.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/2026-04-23-COMMS-NMED-issues-draft-Waste-Isolation-Pilot-Plant-permit-Final.pdf
NMED’s goal is to prioritize the disposal of legacy wastes at the Los Alamos Lab. Not stated, but it will concretely impact plutonium pit production. The National Nuclear Security Administration assumes that it can dump plutonium wastes from pit production at WIPP for the next 30 years and beyond. NMED does not agree.

NNSA officials have referred to WIPP as pit production’s Achilles heel, so the WIPP permit issue bears watching. There is now a public comment period on the new permit open until June 8. For that see https://www.env.nm.gov/hazardous-waste/wipp/

About Bob Kinsey

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996