NRC Announces Hearing Opportunity on Holtec Application For Proposed New Mexico Spent Fuel Storage Facility

As published at NRC's website.

This NRC press release on July 18th came two days after the NRC's licensing proceeding legal intervention deadline date, posted in the Federal Register, on July 16th.

As Beyond Nuclear's Kevin Kamps stated at a July 16th reactor decommissioning and radioactive waste management congressional briefing, NRC's timing is tone deaf bordering on sociopathic or even ghoulish. July 16 is the annual commemoration of two radioactive disasters suffered by New Mexico -- the 1945 Trinity atomic bomb blast near Socorro, which created the world's first downwinders, such as the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Association; and the 1979 Church Rock uranium mill tailings spill, in Navajo Country near Gallup.

NRC chose this date, July 16th, to announce the beginning of the licensing proceeding for the Holtec/ELEA centralized interim storage facility for 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel, targeted at southeastern NM.

Beyond Nuclear, and its legal counsel (Diane Curran of Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, GA), fully intend to meet that deadline. So too do environmental, and environmental justice, allies, both in NM itself, as well as along transport routes that would be used to haul the highly radioactive wastes out there, by road, rail, and/or waterway, across the country.