Thomas Gardiner
While southeastern New Mexico has been a hub for nuclear business, and its leaders eagerly pursue new opportunities, there is some pushback against advancing plans to build an interim nuclear waste storage facility in the region.
“We have a rather long nuclear history in New Mexico, we have a nuclear cluster,” said John Heaton, chairman of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance. “WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) and URENCO both have been very good projects for southeastern New Mexico.”
“This is another group who wants to turn the whole area into a dump,” counters Noel Marquez of the nongovernmental Alliance for Environmental Strategies. “They are pro-waste, looking to benefit from billion-dollar funds to store the waste. We realize it will bring in money, but they value money more than the local population.”
WIPP, near Carlsbad, is the U.S. Department of Energy’s sole permanent repository for transuranic waste from its facilities. It reopened last December following a nearly three-year closure precipitated by a vehicle fire and unrelated radiation release in February 2014.
URENCO operates a gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant in Lea County.
The Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance is a company established by the cities of Carlsbad and Hobbs and Lea and Eddy counties in New Mexico. In 2015, the organization partnered with New Jersey-based Holtec International to develop a consolidated interim storage facility for U.S. spent reactor fuel in the region. The proposed site is 12 miles from WIPP in Lea County.
Marquez lives about 50 miles from that location, near the city of Hobbs. He said his area of New Mexico is dealing with waste issues at WIPP and from the Waste Control Specialists waste storage complex just across the border in Texas. He said his organization is concerned about potential water discharge and rainwater runoff from the WCS property, which stores low-level radioactive waste and other materials.
“I travel and create public art. I ask people what they think about the site and they don’t know; they aren’t hearing anything,” Marquez said. “Many are low English proficiency speakers and don’t get any information.”
Heaton and Marquez both brought their cases recently to the New Mexico Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee.
The interim storage facility fills a national need, according to Heaton. The United States has more than 75,000 metric tons of spent reactor fuel stored at nuclear power plants around the country, and the Department of Energy is years away from meeting its legal mandate to build a permanent repository for the waste. In the meantime, plans are being made to consolidate the fuel in a small number of locations until the final resting place is ready.
Holtec earlier this year applied for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license for a storage facility with capacity for up to 120,000 metric tons of used fuel. Its application was filed nearly a year after Waste Control Specialists submitted its own application for a 40,000-metric-ton facility on its property; that request, though, has been on hold since April.
The New Mexico project has earned the support of Republican Gov. Susana Martinez and members of the state legislature.
Heaton said the project is important for the rural economy in the surrounding area. The nearby WIPP facility already employs about 1,100 people.
Holtec and the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance plan to have the spent fuel facility operational by late 2021 and intend to launch a large-scale public information campaign in early 2018, Heaton said.
“We are developing an outreach program. We would like the people of New Mexico to be informed and understand what it is we are dealing with,” he said. “It is not uncommon for the anti-nuclear community to make false statements and create anxiety over things that don’t exist.”
Marquez said the Alliance for Environmental Strategies is taking its own campaign to the people living near the site, starting with a public information conference next month. The organization is working closely with Albuquerque-based Citizens for Alternatives to Radioactive Dumping (CARD), as well as individual residents and smaller community groups from across the state.
“My daughter is 10 years old. I want her to understand that all of these old guys making choices iin our community are looking at their bottom line. They are not looking at future of children and the unborn that will be affected,” he said.
Marquez’s organization will host a public information event with CARD on Dec. 9 in the city of Roswell.