The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has set a hard deadline of July 30 for public comment on the scope of its environmental review of Holtec International’s license application for an interim spent fuel storage facility in southeastern New Mexico.
The agency extended the comment period by 60 days, but denied a request from a host of antinuclear and environmental organizations for a 180-day extension and 18 more public meetings.
“The NRC staff believes that the six scoping meetings, along with the 120-day scoping period, provides meaningful and ample opportunities for members of the public to submit their comments, while allowing the NRC to make a timely regulatory decision. Therefore, the staff is not planning to conduct additional scoping meetings or further extend the comment period,” Anthony Hsia, deputy director of the NRC’s Division of Spent Fuel Management, wrote in a June 28 letter to the groups. The letter was posted to the NRC website Thursday.
The nuclear industry regulator is reviewing the New Jersey-based energy technology company’s 2017 license application to build and operate a facility that could ultimately hold more than 100,000 metric tons of radioactive waste. The facility, along with a smaller site planned by Waste Control Specialists and Orano in West Texas, could help the Department of Energy to meet its congressional mandate to remove spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants. These storage structures would ultimately be used only until a permanent repository is ready.
The NRC completed a nearly yearlong acceptance review of the Holtec application in February, then began the full technical evaluation covering environmental, safety, and security issues. The process is due for completion in 2020, after which Holtec hopes to begin operations in 2022.
The deadline for filing public comments had been set at May 29, but was extended in mid-May to the end of July. A public hearing was held at NRC headquarters in Rockville, Md., on April 25, followed by five sessions around New Mexico.
Stakeholders made it clear they wanted more time for input. Thirty New Mexico state lawmakers in February urged the agency to keep the comment period open until 2019, when the full state Legislature would convene again. The agency rejected that request, which it said would delay completion of the licensing review.
Less than a week before the NRC signed off on the 60-day comment period extension, nearly 50 nongovernmental groups on May 9 asked for an additional 180 days for input beyond the initial May 29 closure date. That was intended partially to allow time for 18 more hearings in cities across the nation that could be impacted by transport of waste to New Mexico.
Terry Lodge, an attorney representing the environmental group Don’t Waste Michigan, said he was not surprised by the decision. He said the groups’ request put the NRC on notice that they would press for those nationwide hearings again in advance of the release of the draft environmental impact statement (EIS): “Next summer we’re going to make some noise.”
The NRC expects to issue the draft EIS toward the end of next summer, Hsia wrote. It will address possible effects from the facility on air quality, surface water, groundwater, transportation, geology and soils, and socioeconomics. The document will be available for comment, and public meetings are planned in the region around Lea County, where the facility is to be built.
Close to 200 comments have already been submitted to the NRC. Those statements, along with speakers at the meetings in New Mexico, have largely opposed bringing radioactive waste into New Mexico.
“I do not consent to transporting up to 10,000 canisters of highly radioactive waste through thousands of communities nationwide. I do not consent to the risk of contamination of our lands, aquifers, air, or the health of plants, wildlife, and livestock. I do not consent to endangering present and future generations,” wrote Gary Orr, of Jal, a city in Lea County.
Opposition has not been uniform, though. In a March 30 letter, the University of New Mexico chapter of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management argued that consolidating spent fuel reduces the safety and security threat posed by having more than 70,000 metric tons of the material spread around the country.
Holtec’s waste canisters are “able to withstand a 30 foot fall, complete envelopment in fire, and flooding in case the cask falls into a body of water,” the group stated. “It is no exaggeration to state that in these canisters, the waste will be among the most secure materials being transported on our highways and railways.”
Holtec itself has pushed back against concerns over its project. “Despite what some detractors say, there is no us or them when faced with spent nuclear fuel. We are all in this together, and the [consolidated interim storage facility] is a critically important and unifying step forward for New Mexico and our entire country,” Ed Mayer, Holtec’s program director for the facility, wrote in a July 1 column in the Albuquerque Journal.
Mayer pointed out that the federal government faces tens of billions of dollars in liability payments to nuclear utilities because DOE is already more than two decades past the congressionally mandated deadline of Jan. 31, 1998, to begin disposal of used reactor fuel. The federal government has already paid out more than $6 billion, and its ultimate liability has been estimated at up to $30 billion.
The Holtec executive noted that more than 1,300 used fuel shipments in the United States over 35 years were completed without safety breaches. “This is in part due to the technologically advanced and robust transportation casks and customized railcars that are designed to withstand a wide range of human-caused and natural disasters.”
In a separate July 1 column in the Journal, a representative of the Sierra Club countered that the Holtec site “has numerous fatal procedural and structural flaws.” For example: the facility could be vulnerable to terrorists’ use of armor-piercing shells and would lack continuous monitoring for any radiation release, according to John Buchser, water issues chair for the environmental organization’s Rio Grande Chapter.
Radiation from the used fuel would remain dangerous for no fewer than 10,000 years, but storage casks could fail much sooner, he wrote.
