A bill aimed at banning the storage of high-level waste and spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico is no more after the state House of Representatives tabled the measure without debate this week.
House Bill 127, sponsored State Rep. Matthew McQueen (D), is dead in this year’s session of the state legislature, McQueen told RadWaste Monitor via email Wednesday. This after state Speaker of the House Brian Egolf (D) tabled the measure during a chamber meeting Monday. The last day of the legislative session was Thursday — after that, lawmakers won’t return to Santa Fe until 2023.
McQueen said that he expects the bill “to come back next year in the longer 60-day session.”
The measure, which enjoyed support from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D), made it to the full chamber after unanimously passing the state House Judiciary Committee Feb. 8. It was the state House-side version of state Sen. Jeff Steinborn’s (D) legislation, which is still awaiting a vote in the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee. As of Wednesday evening, the bill was not on the committee’s schedule.
The state legislature’s lower chamber canned the proposed measure as Holtec International, a New Jersey-based nuclear services company, is seeking federal approval to build a 500-canister interim storage facility in Eddy County, N.M.
If Steinborn and McQueen’s measure became law, it would have amended state code to allow New Mexico to block certification of a nuclear waste storage site on economic, environmental or environmental justice grounds until the federal government is operating a permanent repository.
That language was added to the bill when the state House’s judicial panel adopted a package of amendments during a meeting Feb. 7. Another one of those updates removed language from the measure about a proposed absolute ban on high-level nuclear waste in New Mexico.
McQueen told committee members at the time that the legislation was getting watered down due to concerns about the state’s legal authority to ban such waste on safety grounds. The changes came after the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) sounded the alarm about the potential legal issue in a Jan. 28 fiscal estimate on the proposed bill.
It’s the third time in as many years that legislation aimed at blocking interim storage in New Mexico has failed in Santa Fe. Steinborn, both last year and in 2020, attempted to pass two ill-fated bills that would have updated the responsibilities of an existing statewide nuclear waste task force to include oversight of privately-owned storage facilities.
As some in the Land of Enchantment become disenchanted with a possible legal counter to the proposed Holtec site, the company’s license application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is stalled. The commission has asked Holtec to provide more information so the feds can complete required safety and environmental reviews for the site. NRC told the company in November that it wouldn’t be able to complete the licensing review in January as planned until it had that extra info.
