Specifically, Matt Palmquist features the government's Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a mile-wide mine 2,150 feet below the New Mexico desert in the Salado salt formation near Carlsbad, NM. The plant has disposed of the equivalent of a quarter million 55-gallon barrels of radioactive military waste. Palmquist reports the waste is both low-level (e.g. X-ray technicians gloves) and high-level nuclear waste and that the site might be a good solution to replace Yucca Mountain.

The article notes the excellent storage properties of salt:

The virtues of the Salado formation are legion: The salt emits almost none of its own radiation, and a half-mile deep in the earth, the deposit is well-isolated, but soft and easy to mine. Also, the salt is "plastic," moving a few inches per year, creeping into WIPP's caverns of nuclear waste to eventually seal them. Once the salt walls close in around the barrels and drums, fractures and openings will shut, leaving no pathway for water or waste to get in or out.

In 15 years, the DOE estimates, the underground facility will be completely closed and impermeable for tens of thousands of years.

The policy implications extend beyond safeguarding America's waste, the article maintains, explaining the grander vision of Jim Conca, director of New Mexico State University's Carlsbad Environmental Monitoring and Research Center.

WIPP counters many of the objections to nuclear power: Proliferation becomes a nonissue if the United States would agree to store other countries' waste ("and we wouldn't even notice it," Conca says), and costs would significantly decrease as new generations of reactors are built. In a world where 2.5 billion people still burn wood or manure as their primary sources of energy, Conca's calculations tell him that a switch to nuclear power is not only necessary but the only safe and ethical path to pursue.