As submitted via the SEED Coalition webform:
<https://actionnetwork.org/letters/halt-holtec?clear_id=true&source=direct_link>
Dear NRC Commissioners and Staff,
This public comment is in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (Docket ID NRC-2018-0052) regarding Holtec International’s application for a license to build and operate a “Consolidated Interim Storage Facility for Spent Nuclear Fuel and High Level Waste” (NUREG-2237).
I oppose Holtec’s proposal and ask that the NRC halt its licensing in order to protect public health and safety, the environment and our economy. It appears from Draft Environmental Impact Statement and other license documents that there would be no dry cask transfer facility at the proposed site, which means there would be no way to repackage waste. The site is not designed for long term disposal, but a dangerous de facto permanent site could result if waste casks or canisters are damaged or corroded and cannot be moved. Consolidated Interim Storage in Texas is also unacceptable. I support and adopt the comments raised by the Nuclear Issues Study Group based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which are as follows:
1. New Mexico Does Not Consent
The motto of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is “Protecting People and the Environment,” yet the NRC’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the Holtec project does neither. Instead, the NRC’s inadequate draft EIS puts people, wildlife and precious water resources at significant and potentially, deadly risk by failing to heed the concerns of the community. We join the All Pueblo Council of Governors, New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard, more than a dozen county and city governments, the Alliance for Environmental Strategies, the New Mexico Cattle Growers Association, the Permian Basin Coalition of Land & Royalty Owners and Operators, the Nuclear Issues Study Group, and the more than 30,000 residents who commented during the 2018 scoping period in vehemently opposing bringing the nation’s high level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants to our communities. We do not consent to becoming a nuclear wasteland for millions of years.
2. Cumulative Impacts
The DEIS is inadequate because it fails to consider cumulative impacts from the damage the nuclear industry has already inflicted on New Mexicans for the past 75 years: uranium mining and milling in the northwest on indigenous Diné and Pueblo lands, including the 1979 Churchrock Disaster; radioactive contamination to Tewa lands and people from the Manhattan project in the Los Alamos area; fallout on downwinders from the Trinity Test in the Tularosa basin; the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, which has already accidentally released dangerous amounts of radiation and now wants to expand; the URENCO uranium enrichment plant in Eunice; the world’s largest nuclear warhead stockpile on the edge of Albuquerque; and the toxic threat to Albuquerque’s aquifer by the Mixed Waste Landfill.
Rather than adding 173,600 metric tons of high level radioactive waste to a state that has already been grossly overburdened, the United States should be directing its resources towards cleaning up the contamination already present in our communities, just compensation, and holistic community health studies. The DEIS also fails to account for cumulative impacts from the other proposal for Consolidated Interim Storage, approximately forty miles east at the current Waste Control Specialists low-level radioactive waste site.
3. Environmental Racism
It’s no coincidence that the United States wants to make New Mexico a nuclear wasteland. It ranks as one of the poorest states and is a majority minority state, with more Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) residents than white residents. For the NRC to determine that nuclear waste which will threaten life for millions of years would have “small” or “no environmental impact” is a blatant violation of environmental justice principles and is environmental racism in action. We do not give our own government license to allow a private industry to further contaminate our home or to expand the massive nuclear burden we already bear.
4. Threats to Cultural Properties & Historic Sites
Holtec International and the NRC would have us believe that the site is a desolate, uninhabited place with “no historic value or significance.” This statement is completely false and without merit. The site is located near or on two lagunas or playa lakes: Laguna Gatuna and Laguna Plata. Lagune Plata is an archaeological district that has been extensively studied for decades. Two sites near Laguna Gatuna, where the nuclear waste is proposed to be stored, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Archaeologists have found a plethora of evidence of the Jornada Mogollon people, dating from 200 AD, 700 AD, and 1200 AD. More than 200 archeological sites are located within six miles of the proposed nuclear waste dump. Laguna Gatuna, while often dry, fills with water after monsoon rains, attracting a variety of wildlife and hunters for millenia. The Hopi and Mescalero Apache nations have identified the area as culturally significant to them, and the Hopi nation has informed the NRC that traditional cultural properties could be adversely affected if this project proceeds. The site where Holtec wants to dump tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste has profound historic value and significance.
5. Threats to Water & Wildlife
The impact of this forever deadly nuclear waste would have devastating consequences on wildlife including threatened species that rely on the lagunas for drinking water and surrounding area as a critical habitat, including the Lesser Prairie Chicken, and the Dune Sagebrush Lizard. Agencies such as U.S. Fish & Wildlife, New Mexico Game & Fish, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New Mexico Environment Dept (NMED) have all gone on record attesting to the significance of Laguna Gatuna for migratory birds, and have argued that it should be designated permanently as a Water of the United States (WOTUS), which would make it eligible for protection under the Clean Water Act.
6. Threats from Transporting Irradiated Nuclear Fuel
Not only New Mexico would be adversely impacted by the Holtec project: all communities along the transportation routes between nuclear power plants and the Holtec proposed site would be threatened by radiation from the rail cars, and from the devastating financial and environmental damage if an accident or act of malice should occur. Studies have shown that one accident is likely to occur for every 10,000 shipments. It is irresponsible and dangerous for NRC to avoid inclusion of these mammoth risks and liability in its DEIS for Holtec’s application.
7. Holtec’s Project is Illegal
Finally, under current U.S. law, this project is illegal. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended, does not allow the federal government to take title to the high level radioactive waste until a permanent geologic repository is operating. So the federal government cannot pay for transportation and storage of the waste as Holtec wants. The license cannot be issued until either a permanent repository is operating, or U.S. law is changed. For all the above reasons and more, I declare that the DEIS for Holtec’s application is inadequate and further that the license for a high level radioactive waste storage facility should be denied. In conclusion, high level nuclear waste from nuclear power plants around the U.S. should not be brought to New Mexico–it should be isolated on or near the current site until there is an environmentally just and scientifically sound option available.
8. Holtec's Site is Geologically Unstable
Earthquakes threaten the site, both natural earthquakes and artificial earthquakes (due to fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel waste deep well injection activities). There is even evidence of large-scale subsidence across the vast Permian Basin, due to fossil fuel extraction. And in the immediate vicinity of the Holtec site, potash mining in the immediate area risks significant subsidence events. And as Fasken Oil and Ranch, Ltd., and the Permian Basin Land & Royalty Owners have warned NRC in the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board licensing proceedings, there is also a significant risk of sinkhole formation near or even at the site, or along impacted transport routes. A large sinkhole on the south side of Carlsbad threatens to engulf a state highway, as well as a railway that could be used for inbound or outbound irradiated nuclear fuel shipments associated with Holtec's CISF.
9. NRC's DEIS is based on Holtec's ER (Environmental Report). As shown by Figure 4.9.1 on Page 4-40 of Holtec's ER (Rev. 0), TRANSPORTATION ROUTES FOR SNF, all outbound shipments of irradiated nuclear fuel leaving the Holtec CISF in NM, bound for Yucca Mountain, NV for permanent disposal, would pass through not only southeastern NM, but also TX and OK, en route to NV. This is shown by the dark green light, indicating an overlap of light green and blue routes, or in other words, an overlap of "Maine Yankee to CISF" (blue) and "CISF to Yucca Mountain" (light green) routes. But the blue "Maine Yankee to CISF" route would be true of a very many of the reactor-to-CISF shipping routes from the eastern half of the United States. And of course the "CISF to Yucca Mountain" light green route would apply to every single shipment from the CISF to Yucca, including those that came from any atomic reactor origin site in the country, such as those in the West. One significance of all this is that southeastern NM, as well as a long swath of TX (including the densely populated Dallas/Fort Worth metro region), and central OK from its southern border to nearly its northern border (including the Oklahoma City metro region) would be hit coming and going. These communities would be hit with inbound shipment to Holtec's CISF, from the east (and half of all reactors, and hence commercial irradiated nuclear fuel, are in the eastern half of the country; in fact, 75% are east of the Mississippi River). And they would also be hit with outbound, CISF to Yucca dump shipments. There could be 80,000 of these outbound shipments, as the 10,000 inbound canisters may very well have to be broken up into smaller sized TADs (Transport, Aging, and Disposal casks). DOE has indicated requiring TADs for disposal at Yucca, and DOE has also expressed its unwillingness to do the rail-sized cask to TAD transfers at the Yucca site itself (or anywhere else, for that matter). Those 80,000 TAD shipments from Holtec's CISF to the Yucca repository represent a significant increase in the probability for a transport accident or attack, as well as increased potential for "routine/incident-free" shipment gamma and neutron radiation dose impacts on people in transport corridor communities, because 80,000 outbound shipments is eight times more than the 10,000 inbound shipments -- meaning accidents and attacks are that much more likely to happen (risk probability increasing proportionally with the number of "rolls of the dice," that is, shipment numbers).
10. Re: the Yucca Mountain, Nevada dump, it is outrageous that both Holtec and NRC have just assumed it is going to open and operate. The Yucca dump scheme violates the following basic criteria for safe sound repository siting and development, as I've detailed in previous comments: 1.) the Yucca dump would be illegal, as it would violate the "peace and friendship" Treaty of Ruby Valley, signed by the U.S. government with the Western Shoshone in 1863; 2.) the Yucca dump would violate consent-based siting; 3.) the Yucca dump would be scientifically unsuitable; 4.) the Yucca dump would be environmentally unjust; 5.) the Yucca dump would violate principles of regional equity (it would signify East dumping on West); 6.) the Yucca dump would exacerbate transport risks; and 7.) the Yucca dump would violate principles of inter-generational equity, due to a 6.66-fold increase in "allowable" or "permissible" radiation exposure to "dose receptors" (that is, people downstream, including the Timbisha Shoshone in Death Valley, CA), 10,000 years post-burial.
Sincerely,
Kay Drey, Board of Directors President, Beyond Nuclear
and
Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist, Beyond Nuclear