New Mexico officials on Tuesday briefed state lawmakers near Carlsbad, N.M., about enforcing a new state law that prohibits storage of spent nuclear fuel in the Land of Enchantment.
Passed in March, the law, SB 53, prohibits the New Mexico Environment Department from granting permits vital to the operation of Holtec International’s proposed consolidated interim storage facility in Eddy County.
These include not only a hazardous waste permit, but also a permit for groundwater discharge during construction of the facility and a permit for on-site petroleum storage, according to slides prepared for the legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee by Bruce Baizel, director for compliance and enforcement for the state environment department.
New Mexico’s legislative session ended in June, but the committee held what is known as an interim meeting this week at Southeast New Mexico College in Carlsbad. They met a little more than a month after a federal court sided with the state of Texas and ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot license commercial companies to consolidate and store spent nuclear fuel away from the reactors that generated the spent fuel.
That effectively killed permits the NRC issued for interim storage to two companies: Holtec, which wants to build in New Mexico, and Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture of Orano and Waste Control Specialists that wants to build in Texas. Holtec has said that the state’s law is superseded by federal law. However, the company had not challenged the state law in federal court as of Friday.
“We have passed a law in New Mexico making it illegal to store high level nuclear waste in the state” state Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D) said at the meeting, which was webcast. “Only the courts could change that reality.”
At the hearing, Steinborn, the sponsor of SB 53, asked John Heaton, vice chair of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance and an ardent supporter of the nuclear waste industry in New Mexico, whether the alliance planned to sue the state of New Mexico over SB 53.
“At this point, we don’t know what Holtec is actually going to do,” Heaton said. “And Holtec is the institution that has the license. It’s not Eddy-Lea alliance. We own the land and have agreed to sell them the land, they have an option to purchase the land.”
However, Heaton said, if there is a lawsuit, Eddy County’s delegation to the Eddy-Lea Alliance has already decided that their county does not want to be a plaintiff.
“If there were to be legal action challenging our law, we have a very good chance that it would be upheld,” Steinborn said.
Meanwhile, in slides prepared for Tuesday’s interim committee meeting, Bill Grantham, a New Mexico assistant attorney general, said that New Mexico’s federal lawsuit over interim storage, which was thrown out of the Ninth Circuit court of appeals, made some of the same arguments that Texas offered in its successful lawsuit in the Fifth Circuit.
