Staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Tuesday preliminarily recommended licensing a facility in New Mexico for temporary storage of spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
The tentative support is provided in the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for Holtec International’s consolidated interim storage facility in Lea County, in the state’s southeast.
“Based on its environmental review, the preliminary NRC staff recommendation is issuance of a license to Holtec authorizing the initial phase of the project, unless safety issues mandate otherwise,” the 488-page document says.
The NRC report evaluates environmental effects in a number of areas, including land use, geology and soils, surface waters and wetlands, groundwater, ecological resources, and air quality. In each area, staff evaluated the impact from the construction, operations, and decommissioning and land reclamation phases of the project.
In nearly all cases, the impacts were determined to be small, with a couple cases in which the impacts were cited as small to moderate. Under NRC regulations, for a small impact, “the environmental effects are not detectable or are so minor that they would neither destabilize nor noticeably alter any important attribute of the resource.”
Holtec, an energy technology company headquartered in Camden. N.J., in March 2017 applied for a 40-year federal license to build and operate its facility. The initial license would cover 8,680 metric tons of spent fuel in 500 canisters, but eventually capacity could be expanded to more than 100,000 metric tons for up to 120 years.
Public input will be taken on the EIS, which is scheduled to be finalized next March. A separate safety evaluation report is also due that month, after which the agency will rule on the license application.
The Holtec project has faced pushback from parties including the administration of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D). The New Mexico Environment Department, a cooperating agency in development of the federal EIS, in December cited a long list of concerns about the then-working draft of the document.
The state agency “will conduct a careful review of how our December comments have been addressed by NRC,” spokeswoman Maddy Hayden said by email. “Based on our review, NMED will may provide additional comments to the NRC during the public comment period on the draft EIS.”
