After a Tuesday hearing to vet a nominee for a senior Department of Energy job, New Mexico’s senior senator pounded the table about making sure proposed interim storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel do not turn into permanent repositories.
“The concern, really, is that the department does not have a plan to ensure that any of these interim storage sites are actually going to be interim,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing after the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s hearing Tuesday.
“I would have that concern irrespective of the geography,” Heinrich said. “In particular, obviously, if it’s in New Mexico we own it. So what I’m hoping to see is an actual plan for long term storage,” he said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently reviewing New Jersey-based nuclear services company Holtec International’s application to build an interim storage site in Lea County, N.M. Another proposed site, owned by Interim Storage Partners (ISP), is under consideration for Texas. The DOE does not license the commercially operated sites.
Opponents of interim storage have sounded the alarm about storing spent nuclear fuel from power plants nationwide at a temporary site in the absence of a permanent disposal solution.
That point is also at the center of another argument the opposition is trying out. Both the New Mexico attorney general’s office and the Texas state legislature have argued that licensing either commercial interim storage site would violate the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which they say mandates a permanent repository before any interim sites can be approved. Industry says that the law only applies to DOE-licensed facilities.
There’s currently no place federally-licensed to store spent fuel for the long term — Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was the only candidate for such a site but the project went unfunded under the Joe Biden administration, and under the Donald Trump administration before that, and the Barack Obama administration before that.
Asked whether the NWPA argument had any credence, Heinrich said that he hadn’t “dug into that in detail.”
“But, on its face, that is sort of a logical position to take,” Heinrich said.
Meanwhile, things are moving along for the proposed interim storage sites. NRC staff last week recommended the ISP site get a federal license. The agency has said a licensing decision should happen in September.
An environmental survey for the proposed Holtec site won’t be ready until November, NRC has said. Commission chair Christopher Hanson told members of Congress July 14 that a final call on that site will come down in January.
