Some of the heaviest hitters in New Mexico politics united this week to oppose construction of the interim spent fuel storage facility the Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed Holtec International to operate in the state.
Holtec has not said when it might begin building the facility, which under an NRC license granted Tuesday may operate for up to 40 years and accept up to 8,680 metric tons of uranium in the form of spent fuel. That is equivalent to about 500 canisters, NRC wrote in the license.
Holtec has said it could seek amendments to that license to increase the amount of spent fuel that could be stored in the proposed facility near Eddy and Lea counties in the southeastern region of the state, which is already home to an oil and gas industry and the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: a federal repository for plutonium-contaminated waste that is critical, among other things, to the cleanup of radioactive waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.
In statements issued after news of Holtec’s license broke, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) and members of the state’s congressional delegation seized on the possibility of license amendments to paint Holtec’s proposed HI-STORE spent-fuel depot as a de facto permanent repository for nuclear waste.
“We will not stop our fight to protect New Mexico from becoming a nuclear dumping ground,” Lujan Grisham wrote in a joint statement with state Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D). “[W]e are evaluating available legal recourse and will take any action necessary to make sure that ground is never broken on this ‘interim’ facility in New Mexico,”
“Today the Nuclear Regulatory Commission used ‘interim’ standards to approve indefinite nuclear storage in New Mexico. No matter how many times NRC and Holtec use the word ‘interim,’ it doesn’t make it so.” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) wrote in a joint statement with four other U.S. lawmakers, “Until there is a permanent repository for our nation’s spent nuclear fuel, no regulatory commission should be using ‘interim’ standards to approve ‘indefinite’ storage. New Mexicans didn’t sign up for this.”
New Mexico in March banned storage of spent nuclear fuel within its borders until, among other things, the state government consents to the storage and the federal government builds a permanent repository for radioactive waste that could accept any waste placed temporarily in an interim site.
Holtec has suggested that the New Mexico law may be preempted by federal law, but the company had not challenged the state ban in court as of Thursday morning.
