The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will meet on April 6 to take additional public input on the scope of an environmental impact statement (EIS) for a planned interim spent nuclear fuel storage facility in West Texas.
Waste Control Specialists last April submitted a license application for a facility with a capacity to hold 40,000 metric tons of used reactor fuel until the Department of Energy establishes a permanent storage site for the material — possibly decades from now. The EIS is part of the regulator’s review of the license application.
The upcoming meeting follows corresponding NRC public events on the EIS last month in Andrews, Texas, Hobbs, N.M., and agency headquarters in Rockville, Md. This one is scheduled for 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at NRC headquarters, 11555 Rockville Pike. “At the meeting, the NRC will receive comments from the public on the appropriate scope of issues to be considered in, and the content of the EIS,” according to an NRC announcement.
The Hobbs hearing drew about 170 people, with 300 attending in Andrews and 70 last time in Rockville, according to an NRC summary of the events. The key issues raised by local residents included contamination of water sources by stored waste, transportation dangers, emergency management, the integrity of the storage casks Waste Control Specialists will use, and worries that interim storage could become permanent storage.
One local official in Hobbs urged the NRC to pay particular attention to neaby communities in New Mexico, which are closer to the planned facility than Andrews. The Waste Control Specialists complex runs along the two states’ border.
“New Mexico residents are the primary affected populations, NOT Andrews,” Tres Hicks, board chairman of the Economic Development Corporation of Lea County, said in a prepared statement to the commission during its stop in Hobbs. “NRC should weigh heavily the concerns of New Mexico residents along the border of New Mexico because it is the people in Eunice, Hobbs, Lovington, Jal … that are the most proximate to the site.”
In the Andrews meeting, city Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Julia Wallace said she had taken offense with implications at the Hobbs meeting that WCS had set up nuclear-waste storage shop in the region to take advantage of its primarily Hispanic population. She described the company as a “good corporate citizen” that has helped the region break from the boom and bust of the oil industry.
More Time to Comment
Meanwhile, the deadline for public comments on the environmental review has been pushed back to April 28. The NRC has not yet ruled on requests from the Sierra Club and 20 other groups for more time to request hearings or intervene in the matter.
This week, the NRC also posted dozens of identical emails expressing opposition to the project to its document website. The emails, submitted in late February based on a template from the website of the watchdog organization Public Citizen, call on the NRC to consider several issues in preparing the EIS: the danger of transporting the material to Texas from nuclear plants around the country; the potential for an accident in shipment or storage of the waste; the potential danger to groundwater once the material is at the WCS facility; and the possibility that interim storage might become permanent storage. “These risks – when included in your review – make the decision to reject WCSs application clear,” the emails state.
Waste Control Specialists CEO Rod Baltzer has sought to allay those concerns in a series of blog posts in February and March. He noted the “exemplary” safety record of transport of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive materials relative to other hazardous substances; and that more than 600 borings at the WCS site turned up no drinkable groundwater.
The company hopes to secure its NRC license in 2019 and to begin operating the storage facility two years afterward.
Holtec International plans by the end of this month to submit its NRC license application for a planned facility in southeastern New Mexico with a capacity to store 120,000 metric tons of spent fuel.
There is now roughly 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel stored at nuclear plants around the country. That amount increases by about 2,000 metric tons per year. The Department of Energy is legally responsible for the ultimate disposition of that material.
