New Mexico is very unhappy about the possibility of a commercial interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel within its borders, a cadre of officials told the Secretary of Energy last week.
The Land of Enchantment “has not and will not consent” to the proposed Holtec International interim storage site in Lea County, N.M., said Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) alongside Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) in a letter which landed on energy secretary Jennifer Granholm’s desk July 2.
The lawmakers said they were concerned that spent nuclear fuel, once stored at an interim site, might never leave.
“Without a strategy in place at the Department of Energy for permanent waste disposal, any CISF constructed in or near New Mexico could become a waste storage site that is, in essence, permanent,” the letter said. “We cannot accept that result.”
While New Mexico is “proud” to play host to other DOE nuclear-complex sites like Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), the letter said, in some cases “this has resulted in situations that have harmed the health and wellbeing of New Mexicans.
“We cannot repeat such harms by establishing interim nuclear waste storage sites, especially without a permanent waste disposal strategy,” the letter said.
According to the letter, Santa Fe remains open “collaborative work to establish a coherent, consent-based federal policy” for disposing of nuclear waste. The secretary of New Mexico’s environment department told RadWaste Monitor in June that the state is “not the site” for an interim storage facility.
Heinrich foreshadowed the July 2 letter in a June 15 hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee about the Department of Energy’s budget request for the 2022 fiscal year. Heinrich is an appropriator for the first time this session. In its 2022 request, DOE asked for $20 million to implement a consent-based siting program for an interim storage site. The agency didn’t budget for the moribund Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nye County, Nev.
Holtec’s proposed interim storage site in New Mexico is one of two such locations currently under review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An environmental impact statement for the proposed site, originally supposed to publish this month, is delayed until November, the agency said July 2.
