I worked twice for the Southwest Information Center which has been mentioned in news stories about this event. Both times we successfully stopped the introduction of radioactive material, leaving a multi-million dollar hole in the ground unused.
The third time I worked against actually introducing radioactive material into the cavern was for the Attorney General of New Mexico, at the time one of the Udalls. There were a number of consultants and I recall that one of the team asserted that there was already water dripping in the cavern, an area that supposedly had been and would be dry for thousands of years. New Mexico won. A Federal Judge in DC ruled against opening the WIPP -- a great but short-lived victory. The Federal governement transferred the "ownership" of the property from the DOE to the Dept. of Interior (or vice versa, can't recall which) which put the property under another set of laws and radioactivity was immediatley introduced into the cavern from which it was never to escape. Until Friday.
A couple of years ago I corresponded with Stewart Brand when he was touting nuclear power as the way to deal with climate change. He inisted that the waste storage issue had been solved, settled forever, with the success of WIPP. He "knew" everything and was uninterested in learning anything. Clever guy but I have zero respect for him.
Gene