Noel Marquez, co-founder of Alliance for Environmental Strategies, at the NRC public comment meeting in Albuquerque, with the tee shirt and banner he designed.Opponents to Holtec International/Eddy-Lea [Counties] Energy Alliance's proposed centralized interim storage facility (CISF) for 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel, targeted at southeast New Mexico, have dominated the half-dozen U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) public comment meetings over the past five weeks. (See the photo, left, by Maddy Hayden of the Albuquerque Journal, of Noel Marquez of Artesia, NM, co-founder of the Alliance for Environmental Strategies (AFES), wearing a t-shirt and in front of a banner, both of which he designed, at the May 22nd public meeting in Albuquerque.)Please continue to submit comments -- by email, and/or snail mail -- and urge others to do so as well (NRC's webform, at www.regulations.gov, has not worked since May 18th, begging the question, if they can't even get this right, how can we trust them to keep highly radioactive waste safe and secure forevermore?!). See how to submit comments and use sample comments, to help you prepare your own, by the current July 30 deadline.
Please also contact both your U.S. Senators, and urge them to block H.R. 3053, the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2018, or any other legislation, that would authorize similar CISFs . Please also urge your U.S. Sens., as well as your U.S. Rep., to support requests by a coalition of 52 environmental groups, including Beyond Nuclear, by themselves contacting NRC and requesting public comment meetings in your state and congressional district. Thus far, not a single public in-person meeting has been held outside of NM, other than one at the NRC HQ in Rockville, MD (which the agency did very little to even notify the public about). This is unacceptable, in that most states would experience very large numbers of road and/or rail shipments of highly radioactive waste, by truck and/or train, if Holtec/ELEA's CISF opens; some states would even experience barge shipments on surface waterways. You can look up your two U.S. Sens.' contact info. here, and your U.S. Rep.'s contact info. here (please also take this opportunity to thank your U.S. Rep. for voting right -- against, a NO vote -- on H.R. 3053, or express your disappointment about them voting wrong -- for the bill, an AYE vote; see how your U.S. Rep. voted, here). Or you can phone your congress members' offices via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Please spread the word to your networks re: the importance of submitting public comments to NRC opposing this environmental injustice (southeast NM has a large percentage of Hispanic residents; the area is already heavily polluted by fossil fuel and nuclear industries). For more info., see Beyond Nuclear's Centralized Storage website section.