For decades, the people of San Ildefonso Pueblo looked across a canyon on their land at big, white domes dotting Los Alamos National Laboratory's Technical Area 54.

The steel and heavy-duty fabric structures are an eyesore, said Pueblo Gov. Leon Roybal, and their contents — thousands of barrels of transuranic waste — raised health and safety concerns among people who live on the pueblo.

The first of the 13 domes was ripped to shreds Wednesday morning, its 4,000 barrels of waste already shipped off to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site in Southern New Mexico. By afternoon, the dome was a pile of rubble. As waste is shipped off from the other domes, they'll be demolished too, said George Rael, assistant manager for environmental operations at the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos Site Office, which is responsible for administering the lab's contract.