State lawmakers in New Mexico want to ban storage of high-level nuclear waste and spent fuel in the Land of Enchantment, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) is with them.
The ban, moving on parallel tracks through the state’s bicameral legislature in the form of two bills that advanced out of committee this week, appeared designed to preempt construction of an interim spent fuel storage site proposed in Eddy County, N.M., by Holtec International of Campden, N.J. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission could license the site this year.
The New Mexico Environment Department, plenty familiar with federal nuclear waste law, has already expressed misgivings about the proposed ban, spearheaded by state Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D). As written, the governor’s own experts say, the ban attempts to give the state a power that only Washington has: the ability to regulate nuclear safety during construction and operation of a nuclear facility.
Not to worry, the Environment Department wrote this week in an official analysis of the proposed ban, the legislature could retune its bills and base the ban on environmental justice, water impacts , economic impacts or all three.
That would give the ban a chance of surviving “lengthy and costly” litigation that could result if the measure passes in its current form and the feds catch wind, according to the state’s analysis.
Steinborn (D) says the ban gives New Mexico the chance to deflect a killer asteroid, though he hastens to add that the proposal does not apply to “low-level waste.”
That’s the type, according to Steinborn, stored at the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) — a place, he pointed out Tuesday during the legislative session, that is directly responsible for “lots of jobs.”
So it is, and not only at the disposal site some 25 miles east of Carlsbad, N.M., but in that city itself, and beyond.
WIPP, of course, does not store spent fuel or high-level waste. Still, a sinister minority of the stuff at WIPP, or bound for it, belongs to a category called remote-handled transuranic waste, which is so radioactive that humans cannot safely touch it.
In that sense, it’s not too different from high-level waste, which New Mexico law basically defines as the plutonium-production byproducts at DOE’s Hanford and Savannah River sites, or spent fuel, which the state essentially defines as burned up rods from civilian reactors.
So what, exactly, is the difference between WIPP and, say, the proposed Holtec facility?
We at the Exchange Monitor will hazard speculation that Holtec’s proposed site would require fewer mining supervisors and elevator mechanics. And in so speculating, we must also concede a point to Sen. Steinborn.
WIPP, as Steinborn told the New Mexico Senate’s Conservation Committee this week, is “very different” from the proposed Holtec site.
WIPP’s disposal panels are just shy of half a mile underground, hollowed out of a massive, prehistoric saltbed deposited across the southwest by a long-vanished sea of dinosaurian vintage.
Holtec’s proposed site would also be underground, though next to WIPP, only technically. The company planned to store spent fuel 22.5 feet below grade, which is probably a sensible approach given that what goes into an interim storage facility is, unlike at WIPP, expected to come out again, at some point.
We at the Monitor will also concede that the jobs at Holtec’s proposed site would also be a little different from the jobs at WIPP — though they’d be strikingly similar on the next census, or on somebody’s tax return.
Or maybe even during some future debate on nuclear waste in Santa Fe.
