ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Residents of New Mexico opposed to a below-ground nuclear waste facility proposed for the state's southeast corner have until the end of today to make their views known to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The NRC held public meetings in five New Mexico cities, where comments were mostly opposed to Holtec International's plan to transport spent nuclear rods to a 960 acre site located halfway between Hobbs and Carlsbad. Holtec is asking the NRC for a 40-year license to temporarily store the waste in Lea County, with an opportunity to extend the license to 120 years.

But there is no federal plan for a permanent storage site, and some critics fear New Mexico will become the permanent home for the spent radioactive fuel. Joni Arends, executive director at Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, said she believes the state already has taken its share of nuclear waste.

"Haven't they put enough in New Mexico?” Arends said. “Everything from Los Alamos National Laboratory to Sandia National Laboratory to the WIPP site; at what point do people stand up and say no?"

Holtec officials argue the facility would be an economic boost for the region and predicted $2.4 billion in capital investment. Following the public comment period, the NRC will prepare an environmental impact statement and determine whether Holtec will be issued a license for the facility.

Comments can be submitted to HoltecCISFEIS@nrc.gov.

Radioactive waste currently is stored at 60 U.S. power plants across the country. Holtec would ship all that waste to the New Mexico site by train, starting with a first phase of 500 canisters, and eventually reaching as many as 10,000. Arends said she does not have confidence in the shipping plan, and said while it will eventually arrive in a remote area of New Mexico, it could be routed through major cities such as Santa Fe.

"When we look at emergency preparedness, we know that many communities along the route are not prepared to respond to an accident,” she said. “And recently there have been many major railroad accidents in the southeastern part of the state."

A coalition of southeastern New Mexico municipalities has partnered with Holtec to bring the project forward, saying it will generate about 100 temporary jobs and about 100 permanent positions.


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Federal officials are in Idaho to discuss where to store nuclear waste. The U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency, is holding two meetings in Idaho Falls. The first is today and will feature a workshop on the siting of radioactive waste facilities. Wednesday's board meeting will focus on the Energy Department's consent-based siting process for waste.

Don Hancock, the nuclear waste program director for the Southwest Research and Information Center, said the consent-based process fell by the wayside during the Trump administration but has become a focus again under President Biden.

"They're starting off saying we think we want to come up with a consent-based process to see if we can store spent fuel for some considerable period of time," he explained. "But people would be consenting to temporary storage as opposed to permanent disposal."

Hancock added the Obama administration decided the siting process should prioritize temporary sites rather than long-term geological storage and the Biden administration has picked up there. The public can be involved in both Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board's meetings this week, either in person or online.

Hancock noted that Boise State University was selected by the Energy Department to receive $2 million dollars to study consent-based siting. However, he added it is not clear what that means for Idaho.

"An important question that I think people of Idaho would want to know is does Boise State and their partners think that what they're doing now and what they could be doing down the line is having Idaho consent to being this kind of interim storage site?," he said.

Boise State University did not respond to a request for comment by the deadline for this story.


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This summer's "Oppenheimer" movie will shine a light on development of the first nuclear weapons, but for many in southern New Mexico it is another reminder of the federal government's failure to recognize negative health effects their families have endured for generations.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and director of New Mexico's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, led the research and development of the first nuclear weapons tested in the southern part of the state.

Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, said residents were unknowingly exposed to radiation from fallout, resulting in illness, emotional and financial distress, and death.

"The Manhattan Project and the Trinity bomb changed New Mexico forever," Cordova pointed out. "Instantaneously we became basically a sacrifice zone, and the people of New Mexico have never been part of the narrative."

Cordova participated in a weekend panel discussion following a sold-out showing of the film in Santa Fe, along with Charles Oppenheimer, grandson of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Cordova noted she has lost count of the number of relatives in New Mexico who have died from cancer, many within 10 years of the nuclear bomb testing.

"In my own family, I'm the fourth generation to have cancer since 1945," Cordova explained. "And now I have a 23-year-old niece who's the fifth generation, and my family's not unique. It's the story we hear all across the southern part of New Mexico, where people lived as close as 12 miles to the test site."

Cordova has spent the past 18 years trying to get areas of New Mexico included in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides money to people who were harmed, either from uranium mining or the atomic tests. The Act currently only offers compensation to "downwinders" who live in Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

"There was an admission of guilt on the part of the government when they established the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act but it didn't go far enough," Cordova contended. "Including New Mexico, there's a lot of the American West that received regular fallout from those tests."


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Concerns are growing in the west about nuclear waste transportation.

On Tuesday, the Snake River Alliance is holding a webinar on these concerns, heightened by the potential of a temporary waste facility opening in New Mexico.

Kevin Kamps is the radioactive waste specialist for Beyond Nuclear. He said these fears are combined with the recent train derailment of toxic waste in Ohio.

He said the federal government and nuclear power industry are rushing to create the New Mexico temporary waste facility.

"These dumps that are proposed are called consolidated interim storage facilities, which means it's only temporary and the waste will have to move again," said Kamps. "So it's really wrongheaded. It's going to automatically double transportation risks."

In May, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued a license for the temporary waste site in New Mexico.

The Biden administration says nuclear power is a key component for the country's clean energy future. However, state officials in New Mexico have voiced their opposition to the facility.

Nuclear waste also is a concern in Idaho. Experiments are starting on new nuclear reactor designs such as small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratory.

However, Kamps pointed out that recent research found these SMRs generate two to 30 times the amount of radioactive waste as traditional nuclear reactors.

"So another downside of all this SMR talk," said Kamps, "which unfortunately Idaho is on the cutting edge of."

Kamps said he believes the country is living on borrowed time when it comes to the potential for disaster from nuclear power.

"We really should be transitioning into a renewable energy economy in this country," said Kamps, "which is much safer, much more secure and actually much more cost effective than nuclear power."




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