Departing New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn made it clear last week: the administration of New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) welcomes interim storage of high-level nuclear waste from U.S. power plants.
Holtec International in November plans to submit a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a 70,000-metric-ton-capacity disposal facility to be located about 10 miles from the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) transuranic waste-disposal facility near Carlsbad.
“We really want that facility,” Flynn told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing in an Aug. 2 phone interview. “We feel very good about the people we have working on it. The relationship with Holtec is strong.”
Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists got the jump on Holtec by filing its license application with the NRC in April for a 40,000-metric-ton facility in West Texas not far from the New Mexico border. The NRC license review is expected to take two years or more.
Flynn will step down Friday after five years in the Martinez administration, the last three-and-a-half as New Mexico’s top environmental regulator. In the past, Flynn has played down the state’s interest in interim storage, sticking to well-socialized language about how New Mexico should focus on reopening WIPP before thinking about any other type of nuclear waste facility. The storage site has been closed since a fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014.
While Flynn, on the cusp of what will be at least a hiatus from public life, was ready to look beyond the WIPP reopening, other New Mexico politicians with statewide constituencies were not.
“No matter where it’s built, whether the site is in Southeastern New Mexico or anywhere else in the U.S., I don’t support creating a new interim disposal site without a plan for permanent disposal because nuclear waste could be orphaned there indefinitely,” Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) wrote in a statement emailed to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on Tuesday. “I also believe that it’s far too early to talk about interim nuclear storage in New Mexico while the state and the Department of Energy are still addressing the WIPP accident and radiation release.”
The Obama administration in 2011 canceled plans for a deep geologic repository for nuclear waste, officially replacing it in late 2015 with a “consent-based” plan that envisions establishing a pilot storage facility by 2021; one or more larger, interim facilities for spent nuclear fuel by 2025; and at least one permanent geologic repository by 2048.
Last year, Udall and fellow New Mexico Democratic Sen. Martin Heinrich issued a joint statement opposing interim nuclear waste storage in the Land of Enchantment. This year, the senators have been largely spared from taking a public stance on interim storage, although both voted for a fiscal 2017 energy and water spending bill that directs the Energy Department to conduct a pilot project for interim waste storage “through 1 or more private sector partners.”
A Heinrich spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment this week.
WIPP closed to new waste shipments after an improperly packaged barrel of radio-contaminated material and equipment from the Los Alamos National Laboratory some 300 miles north burst open in the mine. The Department of Energy recently acknowledged the mine might not reopen in December as announced in February. Nevertheless, the agency’s latest public schedule for WIPP recovery shows DOE only months, not years, behind.
Yet even if WIPP reopens in December, any action on interim storage, whether in New Mexico or elsewhere, will likely wait until after the dust settles from the U.S. presidential election, Flynn thinks. Along with the White House, some Washington watchers believe control of the U.S. Senate may be up for grabs again.
“Time is working against us a little bit,” Flynn said. “I think that decision’s probably going to span over to the next presidential administration. So there’s always the risk that as people kind of step into new roles and have to get themselves back up to speed, that could delay action.”
Nevertheless, the outgoing secretary said, interim waste storage is “another major priority” for the state government.
