The nation’s only underground nuclear repository has received its first shipment of waste, more than three years after shipping was halted in response to a radiation release that contaminated part of the facility and sidetracked the federal government’s multibillion-dollar cleanup program.

The U.S. Energy Department said Monday that the shipment from a federal facility in Idaho marked a milestone for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and the government sites where tons of waste left over from decades of nuclear weapons research and development have been stacking up.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was forced to close in February 2014 after an improperly packed drum of waste ruptured.

Some operations at the repository resumed in December 2016 after an expensive recovery effort, but federal officials have acknowledged the resulting backlog.

A semitractor-trailer hauling two large casks containing the waste passed through the front gates at the repository near Carlsbad in southeastern New Mexico under the cover of darkness.

The repository plans to receive two shipments a week at first, then ramp up to four a week by the end of 2017.

Toyota to invest $1.33B in Ky. plant

Toyota said Monday it is investing $1.33 billion to retool its sprawling factory in Georgetown, Ky., where the company’s Camry sedans are built.

No new factory jobs are being added, but Toyota says the upgrades amount to the biggest single investment ever at one of its existing plants in the United States. The retooling also will sustain the existing 8,200 jobs at Toyota’s largest plant, where about one-fourth of all Toyota vehicles produced in North America are made, the automaker said.

The updates at the Kentucky plant are part of Toyota’s plans to invest $10 billion in the United States over the next five years, said CEO Jim Lentz of Toyota Motor North America, in a news release.

Group appeals gas pipeline route

An environmental group is appealing the approval of a hotly contested natural gas pipeline through the ecologically sensitive New Jersey Pinelands region by the state agency created to protect the area.

The Sierra Club filed an appeal Monday of a Feb. 24 decision by the New Jersey Pinelands Commission to approve a pipeline through the federally protected reserve.

The pipeline is designed to help a power plant switch from coal to gas.

But the New Jersey Sierra Club says the commission failed to follow its own guidelines that require any project in the Pinelands to primarily benefit people living there.