Ryan's District Boards

State regulators failed to collect air samples in the week following a radiation release at a New Mexico nuclear waste dump because of a vacancy in the office responsible for monitoring the site at the time, a state official said on Friday. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where drums of plutonium-tainted refuse from government nuclear weapons laboratories are buried in caverns a half a mile deep, has been closed since Feb. 14, when unsafe radiation levels were detected at the site. The plant, the only facility of its kind in the United States, is run under contract for the government by Nuclear Energy Partnership LLC. Plant managers initially denied that employees working above ground at the site had been affected but said later that 22 workers were exposed to radiation, though at low levels not considered harmful to their health. State sampling resumed a week after the radiation leak, said Susan Kamat, director of that office.