Local leaders in southeast New Mexico supported and ultimately brought an underground nuclear waste repository – the only of its kind in the U.S. – to their community.
Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus | September 23, 2022 usatoday.com
The Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant first started accepting transuranic (TRU) waste in 1999, about 30 miles east of Carlsbad.
And as the DOE aims to retool how it evaluates consent when siting nuclear waste storage, earmarking $16 million for the project, city and county leaders near the WIPP site hope their voices of approval will again be heeded for another facility to store nuclear waste.
The location for Holtec’s project was already chosen and would likely be unimpacted by the DOE’s two-year project to define policies to site future projects, but the announcement by the Department opened a national dialogue on what it means for a community to consent to taking in nuclear waste.
Holtec International was recruited in 2015 by a consortium of city and county leaders in the region known as the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance to build a site to temporarily hold spent nuclear fuel rods at the surface on a 1,000-acre tract not far from the WIPP site.
That waste, the byproduct of nuclear power reactors, would be much higher in radiation than the TRU waste disposed of at WIPP, and the Holtec site was designed to only hold it temporarily until it can be moved again to a permanent repository.
A facility to dispose of and permanently isolate the spent fuel does not exist in the U.S., and Holtec’s proposal set off a wave of opposition from New Mexico’s state leaders including Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, State Land Commissioner Stephanie Garcia Richard and New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas.