The president of southeastern New Mexico's troubled nuclear waste dump has been ousted as investigations into a truck fire and radiation release near completion.
URS Corp., the company that runs the Waste Isolation Pilot Project for the Department of Energy, says Farok Sharif has been replaced as head of the Nuclear Waste Partnership. In a statement Thursday, the company says Bob McQuinn has been named president and project manager. Sharif has been moved to a new job overseeing the program for transitioning nuclear waste to other locations while WIPP is not operational, and working with other U.S. Department of Energy sites to develop plans for the temporary storage of their waste.
The change comes as teams are investigating back-to-back incidents that shuttered the nation's only deep underground nuclear waste repository last month.
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