New Mexico lawmakers press Holtec on waste safety

As reported by the Santa Fe New Mexican.

The article reports:

Pending federal approval, Holtec would store some 10,000 200-ton canisters underground on a 1,000-acre desert facility “35 miles from the nearest human habitat,” according to the company’s website. The drums of waste would come to New Mexico by train. (emphasis added)

That's an odd thing for Holtec to say. Beyond Nuclear's members and supporters, who have provided legal standing for our intervention in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing proceeding, live and work within just a few, to several, miles of the targeted site for Holtec International's "consolidated interim storage facility." (CISF) One lives just a mile from the proposed CISF.

In addition to that, countless millions of Americans, in most states, live along the road, rail, and/or waterway transport routes that would be used to ship highly radioactive wastes to southeastern New Mexico. On Sept. 5, 2019, the former head of Environmental Justice (EJ) at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mustafa Ali, warned on Democracy Now! that such high-level radioactive waste trucks, trains, and/or barges, would themselves be EJ violations, as they pass through low income, people of color communities.

Such shipments would go on for not years, but decades.

It seems that for Holtec, certain people just don't count, when there are many billions of dollars to be made -- albeit, yet again, at public expense! (Not to mention risk, and liability!)

It's not just NM state legislators opposed to Holtec's CISF. In June 2019, NM's governor, public lands commissioner, and U.S. Rep., Deb Haaland (a Democrat, one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, in 2018), all spoke out strongly against Holtec. In addition, the All Pueblo Council of Governors did so as well, against Holtec as well as Interim Storage Partners CISF at Waste Control Specialists in Texas, on October 21, 2019.

Help us stop this environmental injustice, dead in its tracks!

Contact your U.S. Representative, and both your U.S. Senators. You can be patched through to your Congress Members' D.C. offices via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

Urge your U.S. Rep. and Sens. to vote against any legislation that would authorize the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to take ownership of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel at an interim site, without a permanent repository open.

Such bills include the McNerney (D-CA)-Shimkus (R-IL) Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2019, H.R. 2699. Its U.S. Senate equivalent is S.________, the discussion draft of H.R. 2699, that has yet to be assigned a bill number on the Senate side; however, U.S. Sen. Barrasso (R-WY), chairman of the Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, introduced the bill during a hearing on May 1, 2019.

Another bill that must be opposed, along similar lines, is S. 1234, the Nuclear Waste Administraton Act of 2019, sponsored by U.S. Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

This major reversal of U.S. high-level radioactive waste policy, which would further amend the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended, would risk the proposed "interim" site becoming a de facto permanent, surface storage, "parking lot dump." DOE itself has warned that surface storage, with loss of institutional control over a long enough period of time, risks catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity directly into the environment, as containers fail, but are not replaced.

Beyond Nuclear joins with hundreds of environmental and EJ groups across the country calling for reactors to be shut down ASAP, so no more high-level radioactive waste is generated. For the 80,000+ metric tons of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel that already exists, HOSS, Hardened On-Site Storage (or as Near-Site as is safely possible), is a nationwide environmental consensus.

But HOSS is an interim measure, lasting only decades. A permanent geologic repository must also be sought, which is scientifically suitable, environmentally just, legal, intergenerationally equitable, regionally equitable, minimizes transport risks, etc.