The New Hampshire legislature is considering a bill intended to shut the door on disposal of nuclear waste in the state even while establishing three bodies to address the issue.
House Bill 704 would formalize the legislature’s opposition to building a facility for high-level radioactive waste in New Hampshire “and finds that the north-east is an unsafe and hydrogeologically and geologically inappropriate area in which to locate a site for the permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste.”
In 1986, a 78-square-mile plot near the town of Hillsborough was among the locations the U.S. Department of Energy considered for permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste, according to the bill introduced by Rep. Robert Cushing (D). New Hampshire lawmakers quickly passed the 1986 High Level Radioactive Waste Act, which set state policy against such a facility. That law was eventually repealed in 2011.
In 1987, the U.S. Congress designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the sole location to be considered for permanent disposal of high-level radioactive waste and spent fuel from U.S. commercial power reactors. While that project has made halting progress in subsequent decades, and remains unlicensed, there has been no serious move to find another location for the material.
Nonetheless, “It is the intent of this act to reaffirm New Hampshire’s unyielding opposition to any effort of the federal government to site a nuclear waste dump anywhere in the state, and to reenact the High-Level Radioactive Waste Act,” Cushing’s bill says.
Similar legislation from Cushing died in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 2016, according to the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism.
The new bill would create a nuclear waste policy advisory committee, a nuclear waste technical review council, and a spent nuclear fuel study commission.
There is one nuclear power plant in New Hampshire: NextEra Energy Resources’ Seabrook facility.
Cushing’s bill, filed last month with five co-sponsors, is before the House Science, Technology, and Energy Committee.
