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New Mexico shouldn't be the nation's nuclear dump
May 13, 2023
The federal government’s longstanding failure to build a repository for nuclear waste should not be left for New Mexico to solve.
Yet a decision last week by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to issue a license to “temporarily” store tons of spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico could mean waste from commercial power plants across the nation will end up buried in the state. It’s bad news for us, of course, but it’s catastrophic for a nation that has never fully come to grips with the reality of nuclear power.
To recap: The commission said it will allow Holtec International to build and operate a nuclear waste storage facility near the Lea and Eddy County line in far southeast New Mexico.
This, despite the clear message from New Mexico’s congressional delegation, governor and statewide elected officials that the state is not interested in being the one-size-fits-all nuclear storage solution for the country. New Mexico already hosts the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. It stores transuranic waste, a byproduct of the country’s nuclear defense program.
Opening the Holtec facility would up the ante, bringing highly radioactive spent fuel to our state. The spent fuel consists of uranium pellets inside metal rods and can be handled only by machines. It’s so radioactive people who work near it are protected by steel or concrete.
The consolidated interim storage facility planned for New Mexico would have the capacity to store up to 8,680 metric tons of used uranium fuel, with possible future expansions to make room for as many as 10,000 canisters over six decades.
Material would arrive in New Mexico via rail. While that seems a smidge safer than high-speed truck traffic over crowded interstates and well-traveled New Mexico roads, recent derailments make the thought of rail travel worrisome.
And temporary has a way of becoming permanent, considering the federal government has no solution for the growing piles of waste at commercial nuclear reactors all over the country.
With New Mexico’s nuclear history — home of the atomic bomb, site of nuclear bomb testing and today’s expanded plutonium pit construction — surely the state has contributed its share. Besides, who is the NRC trying to kid? A storage facility cannot be “interim” without a final, designated location. Such a site does not exist. And when it comes to anything nuclear, there’s no such thing as interim or temporary.
The decision by federal regulators to license the plant ignores the will of the state Legislature — lawmakers passed legislation during the 2023 session aimed at stopping the project. Next up: a court battle over the license.
Holtec officials, evidently unconcerned about the will of New Mexico’s elected representatives and many of its citizens, point to federal law, which they say preempts state action. The company already has invested $80 million to seek the 40-year license to build and operate the facility. Officials are promising an economic boom to go along with becoming the nation’s nuclear waste dump.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, local officials in southeastern New Mexico — some of them, anyway — are welcoming the jobs the plant will bring. We’re not sure they have thought out the potential long-term consequences, considering the federal government’s reluctance to confront the problem of nuclear waste. A storage site was going to be built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but state and federal politics blocked the project.
As a result, the United States lacks the infrastructure to dispose of radioactive nuclear waste. And that’s where the state’s congressional delegation comes in. They must push harder, fanatically if need be, to break the legislative logjam on Yucca Mountain, which has become an accepted impasse. This state’s future depends on their success.
Meanwhile, New Mexico is poised to become the interim — cue eye roll — solution. That’s not the future New Mexico wants or deserves.
Greg Mello published comment:
There is plenty of blame to go around in the present impasse. Every faction in this debate needs to rethink its position, even as the fine work by so many citizens to stop this absurd proposal deserves praise and assistance. Consolidated "interim" "storage" wouldn't be "interim" and wouldn't be "storage," though it would be "consolidated." Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) needs to be disposed underground, and soon.
We environmentalists can be faulted for demanding perfection at every turn, with the result that there is no disposal facility. Our society will not be stable henceforth, fundamentally because the era of cheap fossil fuel era is over, and the complexity of frivolous and often parasitic "economic" activity and structures will not be sustained. In multiple ways, we are running out of the real capital stored in nature, including the so-called "ecosystem services" that maintain our livable climate and habitats. There are no efficient substitutes for polluting fossil fuels.
SNF is a very dangerous material to leave around, especially in spent fuel pools but also in dry cask storage aboveground -- or in shallow below-ground storage for decades to come. There is good rock in many places and at great enough depth, everywhere. We need to loosen our requirements for disposal sites, just enough to make disposal feasible. Specifically, the requirement for retrievability can be ditched, because that is not going to happen in any case. Other requirements might need review as well. Too many parties profit financially or politically by delay just as the nuclear power industry would profit from laxity.
As Chris Mechels says, incompetence and pure politics have been huge factors. The present administration, including DOE, is extremely incompetent almost across the board. DOE Secretary Granholm's statement that all military vehicles should be electrified by 2030 was a breathtaking admission that she knows nothing about energy. The appointment of that narcissist and serial thief Sam Brinton, thankfully now disgraced and gone, to be in charge of SNF only goes to show how deep the incompetence and lack of seriousness runs.
Once the requirement for retrievability is ditched, new prospects dawn, such as deep borehole disposal in stable rocks well below the biosphere. As to issues of interstate equity and related matters, there are indeed issues of moral hazard, equity, and internalization of externalities in siting decisions. We believe, as a starting point, SNF can and should be disposed in the states and areas which have benefited from the electricity that created the problem. Each situation is different, but without a real will to solve the problem -- and it is a solvable problem -- our institutional failures and inequities will push the problem into the future and onto those with the least political power.
By the way, this newspaper seems to think that it can make a political case for endorsing plutonium pit production for new nuclear weapons that could wipe out humanity overnight by folly or miscalculation, just to mention one little problem with this mission -- which it does endorse, every day of the week -- while rejecting the relatively benign SNF. Yes, you read that right. In the big picture, SNF casks are in many ways more benign than new nuclear weapons.
The notion of seeking "livability" in Santa Fe while making its major export product -- nuclear weapons cores -- makes one's head swim.
Reprocessing: this just hasn't panned out, and generates enormous quantities of nuclear waste. I'm afraid nuclear power is no panacea in any part of the fuel cycle, at any reactor scale.
But to go back to the beginning, we are going to have start discussing what is important in life and living it, leaving the wasteful froth in favor of the eternal values that have steadied humanity and which, unseen, provide the foundation of our present civilization as well, which also will be the foundation of any future civilization, if we are so fortunate as to have one.
One indicator of where we stand in history is that at every turn, we encounter fundamental issues, in cascading synergy, that go far beyond the capacity of our society to debate or address. We will live, or not, and if we choose, be the answers before we understand them. New challenges will replace the old as we approach a kind of historical event horizon, beyond which nothing sure is visible.
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