Nuclear Reactions

The authoritative history of the most ambitious (and perhaps most controversial) nuclear waste repository in the United States, now in an updated edition covering twenty-five years of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant’s operation.

Before the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant received its first shipment in 1999, the facility had been actively planned for a quarter century and essentially completed for years, but it was plagued by over a decade of delays and has remained controversial since its opening. More than twenty-five years later, this new edition of the history of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant lays out the problems and conflicts behind those delays and controversies and how they continue to widen the gulf between America’s ability to create sophisticated weapons and its ability to show it can clean up after them.