38 environmental groups call on NRC to extend comment period till Oct. 30, postpone license intervention deadline for proposed Holtec/ELEA CISF

An environmental coalition of 38 organizations has written the five U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission commissioners, as well as the safety and environmental NRC staff leads on the Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance centralized interim storage facility (CISF) license application proceeding, urging a 90-day extension to the environmental scoping public comment deadline. The current deadline is July 30; the coalition is requesting an extension till Oct. 30.

In addition, the coalition is requesting the legal intervention deadline in the licensing proceeding be postponed, and that proceeding suspended. Just this past Monday, July 16th, NRC published a Federal Register Notice, announcing September 14, 2018 as the deadline for requesting a hearing, and submitting legal contentions against the proposal. Legal intervenors must also establish legal standing in that short 60-day time frame.

The three main points in today's environmental coalition letter, justifying the requested 90-day extension for public environmental scoping comments, and suspension of the licensing proceeding, are:

1.) Redaction of 25% of the Holtec CISF Environmental Report Limits Public Commenting and Ongoing Preparations To Intervene In Licensing Proceeding;

2.) Serial Unavailability of Regulations.gov and ADAMS (the NRC's Agency-wide Document Access and Management System), making the preparation and submission of public comments unacceptably difficult;

3.) The NRC Is Legally Obligated to Restore Fairness To the Scoping Stage of This Licensing Proceeding.

Regarding the second point, the largely to entirely out-of-order status of Regulations.gov for most of the public comment period thus far, right up to the present: NRC in recent days has responded to a mid-June request, by Beyond Nuclear's legal counsel, Diane Curran of Washington, D.C., for an extension to the comment deadline, due to the dysfunction of the primary comment submission mechanism provided by NRC to the public.

NRC's response essentially blamed the victim, stating that the public should have worked with Regulations.gov itself to make sure the system worked properly. Concerned citizens, and environmental group representatives, have been notifying NRC since at least May 1st that its Regulations.gov site for public comment was not working properly, or at all. NRC's letter rejects the environmental coalition's mid-June request for an extension of the scoping deadline.

"The signers of today's letter suggest that there are 'extremely compelling circumsances' present here that obligate the NRC to extend the public comment scoping period, and further compel the delay of commencement of the intervention petition filing period until after interested parties have obtained relief under the Freedom of Information Act," said Terry Lodge, Toledo-based legal counsel for Don't Waste Michigan. "Fundamental concerns of fairness, coupled with the National Environmental Policy Act's expectation of maximal public participation, and the high significance of the Holtec/ELEA CISF itself, as a policy determination, all militate in favor of altering the present deadlines," Lodge added.

"Not only do we have to do NRC's job for it, in terms of protecting public safety, security, health, and the environment, but now we also have to do the agency's job for it by making sure its computer systems work," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear. "It makes me wonder why NRC needs to have thousands of employees, and a budget of many hundreds of millions of dollars per year, when the concerned public is constantly forced to do NRC's job for it, because the agency can't be bothered," Kamps said.

"The public demands NRC return the funds provided by ratepayers and taxpayers to the agency, due to its regulatory incompetence -- and worse, complicity and collusion with the hazardous industry it is supposed to regulate," Kamps added.

The Holtec/ELEA CISF is an environmentally unjust proposal, for up to 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel to be "temporarily stored" in southeastern New Mexico. The Texas/New Mexico borderlands are home to large Hispanic populations; they are already badly polluted by intensive fossil fuel and nuclear industires. If opened, this de facto permanent, surface storage, "parking lot dump" would significantly worsen New Mexico's treatment as a "nuclear sacrifize zone," but would also launch unprecedented thousands of high-risk, highly radioactive waste shipments, by truck, train, and/or barge, on roads, rails, and/or waterways, through most states, many major cities, and the vast majority of U.S. congressional districts, over the course of a half-century. If the highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel ever did leave someday, after 40, 100, 120, or 300 years of "interim storage" (all figures Holtec/ELEA has cited at various times), then the departing shipments would double transport risks, sometimes in the very same communities through which they passed in order to reach New Mexico in the first place.