"This is a bad, old idea that's been uniformly rejected on a bipartisan basis by politicians when it came up in the past, and it's been strongly opposed by citizen groups like mine and others," said Don Hancock, a member of the watchdog group Southwest Research and Information in Albuquerque. "It's also clear that it's illegal." Hancock was commenting on federal plans to ship some of the radioactive waste from Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reserve to New Mexico, a plan supported by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D). Both states will need to approve the plan. Six of the Hanford tanks holding radioactive sludge from nuclear weapons production have been found to be leaking intro groundwater. The plan would mean shipping 3 million gallons of radioactive waste from Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad.