The New Mexico Senate on Monday voted down a bill intended to increase state oversight of a planned commercial storage facility for radioactive spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
Senators voted 25-16 against the legislation from Sen. Jeff Steinborn, a Democrat from Las Cruces.
Senate Bill 95 would have instituted several updates to the 1978 state Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Act, which established the state Radioactive Waste Consultation Task Force to negotiate with the Department of Energy over the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant that was eventually built near the city of Carlsbad for disposal of federal defense transuranic waste.
Had Steinborn’s bill passed, the task force would have been directed to evaluate federal license applications for privately run radioactive-waste disposal sites in New Mexico, including their potential effects on public safety, environmental, health, infrastructure, and transportation. Findings would then have been passed on to the New Mexico Legislature, governor, and relevant state agencies.
Holtec International, an energy technology company based in Camden, N.J., in March 2017 applied for a 40-year license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build and operate a facility in southeastern New Mexico for storage of 8,680 metric tons of used fuel. With additional NRC authorizations, the site could hold more than 100,000 metric tons of the radioactive material for up to 120 years. It is not intended to be a permanent disposal facility, but instead to hold used fuel until a federal repository is available.
Steinborn and other state leaders have raised a number of concerns about the project, including its potential harm to the New Mexico economy and whether interim storage could become permanent if the federal government remains unable to build a waste disposal facility.
“The fortunate thing is the (state) administration is a cooperating agency with the NRC,” Steinborn said, according to the Carlsbad Current-Argus. “So, while I think it was a misguided vote, clearly there’s a lot of support to look out for New Mexico and New Mexicans. The administration continues to be on the forefront to evaluate it with the NRC.”
Meanwhile, the New Mexico House of Representatives has yet to vote on a measure that would more directly state its opposition to the used-fuel storage project.
House Memorial 21, from Rep. Matthew McQueen (D), says only that the chamber is resolved to “oppose the transportation of high-level radioactive waste to, and storage in, New Mexico.” The House Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources Committee, which the Santa Fe lawmaker chairs, approved the memorial on Feb. 3.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is extending to March 25 the comment period on the license transfer application for the three reactors and spent-fuel storage pad at the Indian Point Energy Center in upstate New York.
The comment period was scheduled to end Monday. Another 30 days were added following a request from Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Nita Lowey (all D-N.Y.).
“The roughly three hundred page license transfer application is a comprehensive and technical document that will prove to be a vital roadmap for local otlicials, stakeholders and residents in the surrounding Westchester and Hudson Valley communities that will be both directly and indirectly impacted by the closure of lPEC,” the lawmakers wrote in a Jan. 21 letter to NRC Chairman Kristine Svinicki. “Providing only thirty days for the public to review the document after it is published in the Federal Registrar does not allow the affected communities to provide meaningful input to NRC on this license transfer application.”
Reactor Unit 1 at Indian Point was retired in 1974. Plant owner Entergy plans to retire Unit 2 by the end of April and then Unit 3 a year afterward. It would then sell the entire property to New Jersey energy technology company Holtec International, which would assume ownership of the decommissioning trusts for all three reactors and all responsibility for cleanup.
The NRC must approve the license transfers for the sale to proceed. Holtec and Entergy filed their license transfer application in November. The prospective new owner says it can complete decommissioning the reactors within 15 years at a cost of $2.3 billion.
In a Jan. 31 letter to Svinicki, the three New York lawmakers, along with Reps. Eliot Engel and Sean Patrick Maloney (both D-N.Y.) also threw their weight behind a commission hearing on the license transfer application. They said a request for a hearing was anticipated from the state of New York. Last week, the New York Attorney General’s Office, a group of local government bodies, and two environmental organizations filed separate applications for intervention and hearings in the proceeding. If the petitions are approved, the parties would be able to raise concerns about the license transfer in a hearing.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has granted an exemption to NorthStar Nuclear Decommissioning Co. on a reporting requirement for transport of low-level radioactive wastes from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.
In August 2019, NorthStar requested an extension from 20 days to 45 days to be notified that a waste shipment has arrived at the Waste Control Specialists disposal facility in Texas. The wastes are shipped by rail.
Experience shows that this notification frequently occurs over 20 days after the wastes leave Vermont Yankee, according to a Feb. 11 notice in the Federal Register. The idea is “to avoid an excessive administrative burden as operational experience indicates that rail or mixed mode shipments may take more than 20 days to reach their destination,” the agency said.
The low-level radioactive wastes are generated by decommissioning of Vermont Yankee, which has been underway for about a year.
New Orleans-based Entergy retired Vermont Yankee’s single boiling-water reactor in December 2014, after 42 years of operation. In 2016, Entergy announced its intention to sell the site to New York City-based demolition specialist NorthStar Group Services. That sale was finalized in January 2019. Decommissioning is managed by a new NorthStar subsidiary, NorthStar Vermont Yankee.
In 2020, NorthStar plans to remove a few buildings plus the site’s off-gas system that collects internal gases from the reactor. The turbine building is set to be torn down in 2021. The three-year project of tearing down the reactor systems and building is due to begin in 2022. All of Vermont Yankee’s spent fuel — 58 casks with roughly 3,000 fuel assemblies — is in dry storage.
From The Wires
From The Associated Press: More than 2 million pounds of radioactive waste from fracking were shipped from North Dakota to a landfill in Oregon, in breach of state regulations.
