By John Stang
Several New Mexico state legislators wondered last week if a proposed temporary used nuclear fuel storage site east of Carlsbad could become permanent by default.
Opponents of Holtec International’s planned consolidated interim spent fuel facility also asked, during a May 18 hearing of the New Mexico Legislature’s Interim Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, why the radioactive waste could not stay at nuclear power reactors until a permanent repository is ready.
“We don’t have a timeline on how many years the material will be in southeastern New Mexico,” said state Sen. Carlos Cisneros (D). State Rep. Stephanie Garcia Richard (D) added: “I’m convinced there is no true plan for a repository.”
The Department of Energy is legally required to build a final disposal site for what is now nearly 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors. With the decades-long dispute over the planned location at Yucca Mountain, Nev., still unresolved, there has been increasing focus on consolidating the radioactive waste in a small number of locations until the permanent repository is ready.
New Jersey-based energy technology company Holtec in March 2017 applied for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for a Lea County, N.M., facility with maximum planned capacity of over 100,000 metric tons of fuel. A partnership of Waste Control Specialists and Orano is also expected to revive an NRC license application that WCS froze in 2017 for a smaller facility in West Texas.
“There is a plan for a repository, but it’s a failed plan. Once it’s there (the used fuel) doesn’t move until there’s some place to move it,” Don Hancock, Nuclear Waste Safety Program director for the Albuquerque-based Southwest Research And Information Center, told lawmakers regarding interim storage.
Holtec is partnering on the project with the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance, a coalition of jurisdictions in the region. John Heaton, chairman of the organization, said at the meeting there is risk in leaving the used fuel at current locations: Reactors need water for cooling, meaning radioactive material is located near oceans, lakes, or rivers, he said. Some nuclear plants are also in areas prone to seismic shifts, Heaton added. Assuming the federal government successfully builds the repository at Yucca Mountain, he said, it could take “a couple or three decades” for it to open.
The NRC has determined spent fuel can be safely stored on-site at reactors, or away-from-reactor facilities, until a repository is available, commission Chairman Kristine Svinicki has said.
Holtec’s site is geologically stable, Stefan Anton, the company’s vice president for engineering and licensing, said during the Legislature hearing.
Heaton added that even if New Mexico stops the Holtec project, the Waste Control-Specialists-Orano facility would be built just east of the state border in Texas. That means New Mexico could suffer ripple effects from that operation while having no oversight, he said.
The NRC technical review of the Holtec license application is expected to be complete by July 2020. If approved, Holtec hopes to open the initially licensed part of the facility, with capacity for 8,680 metric tons of used fuel, by 2022.
A number of New Mexico legislators are concerned about the NRC making decisions before their government can review and officially weigh in on the project.
Holtec has not yet decided which railroad routes will be used to transport the spent fuel from reactors around the county, Anton said. The company needs to determine which reactor sites — mostly from east of the Mississippi River — will ship their used fuel to New Mexico. There has never been a rail or road accident involving nuclear fuel or radioactive wastes, Anton said. A short rail line will have to be built from the nearest railroad track to the Holtec site to finish the fuel’s journey.
The vast majority of the nation’s nuclear power plants are east of the Mississippi River, and legislators and the public at the hearing protested New Mexico would be accepting a nuclear waste problem it had no role in creating. The state has no nuclear power plants, but the region in which the Holtec facility would be built is already home to DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground disposal site for transuranic waste, and URENCO USA’s uranium enrichment operation.
Jimmy Carlile, a supervisor at Midland, Texas-based Fasken Oil and Ranch, said a leak at the Holtec facility could harm southeastern New Mexico’s growing number of oil fields. “Southeast New Mexico has more drilling activity than, as far as I know, it has ever had. The future is dramatically better for the people there than it’s been in a long time. We simply can’t risk damage to that business,” he said.
The NRC this week conducted its last two public hearings on the Holtec application, in the New Mexico cities of Albuquerque and Gallup. Local news reports indicate the majority of speakers at those meetings opposed the project.
