Celebrating Major EJ Victory: Holtec-ELEA’s Cancellation of NM Nuke Dump!

Beyond Nuclear Celebrates Holtec and ELEA’s Termination

of Radioactive Waste Dump Scheme in New Mexico

Hard-Won Grassroots Environmental Justice Victory

Took More Than a Decade to Win

Beyond Nuclear has fought against this Holtec-ELEA consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) since the get-go on “Nuclear Fool’s Day” (April 1), 2017, when Holtec’s CEO, Krishna Singh, publicly unveiled the CISF license application just submitted to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), at a Capitol Hill press conference. In fact, Beyond Nuclear and coalition allies wrote the NRC in October 2016, warning that CISFs — such as Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) in Texas, some 40-miles east of Holtec’s site — were illegal on their face, and urging the agency to cease and desist from processing such applications. NRC ignored our and others’ warnings and pleas, and proceeded full steam ahead with docketing the license applications.

Many long years of intense NRC licensing proceedings on both Holtec and ISP’s CISFs, and related environmental reviews, followed. Our coalition engaged at every twist and turn, alongside environmental allies in New Mexico, Texas, and across the country. For example, we broke subject matter records, in terms of the number (many tens of thousands) of public comments opposing both dumps, at the environmental scoping, as well as the Draft Environmental Impact Statement stages, despite the latter taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Grassroots environmental coalition partners, including Don’t Waste Michigan, et al. (Citizens’ Environmental Coalition of New York, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination in Michigan, Demanding Nuclear Abolition (formerly Nuclear Issues Study Group) of New Mexico, Nuclear Energy Information Service in Illinois, Public Citizen’s Texas Office, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace of California, and Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Texas), as well as Sierra Club chapters in New Mexico and Texas, generated many dozens of contentions in NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board proceedings, all of which were rejected in short order, rulings rapidly upheld by the NRC Commissioners despite our appeals.

So our coalition, which includes an oil and ranching company, as well as the States of New Mexico and Texas, appealed to three separate federal courts of appeal across the country. Many years of federal court battles have taken place, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court ruled last June that Texas and the oil/ranching company lacked standing, the merits of dump opponents’ cases, including Beyond Nuclear’s, have never gotten their day in court. Beyond Nuclear is considering further appeals of adverse rulings by the federal courts thus far, in an attempt to address the CISFs’ violation of such laws as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

Beyond Nuclear thanks the attorneys representing us in these proceedings, Diane Curran of Harmon Curran in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. We also thank Wally Taylor, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based attorney who served as legal counsel for Sierra Club, as well as Terry Lodge, the Toledo, Ohio-based attorney who served as legal counsel for Don’t Waste Michigan, et al., in these proceedings.

We also thank the expert witnesses who served Sierra Club and Don’t Waste Michigan, et al., including: the late Robert Alvarez of Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.; Dr. James David Ballard, a retired California State University, Northridge professor (see his report, here); Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in Vermont; and Dr. Gordon Thompson of Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Massachusetts.

Last but not least, Beyond Nuclear thanks its members and supporters in New Mexico and Texas — most of them working ranchers and orchardists — who have steadfastly provided legal standing for our NRC interventions and federal court appeals, over the course of many long years.

New Mexico is a majority minority state. That is, a majority of the state’s population is Indigenous or Latinx. Beyond Nuclear thanks such Indigenous leadership as provided by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, and Latinx leadership as provided by Alliance for Environmental Strategies, for helping secure this EJ victory against the Holtec-ELEA dump. Since time immemorial, a large number of Indigenous Nations have had connections to the proposed CISF site, adjacent to Laguna Gatuna in southeastern New Mexico, as evidenced by the rich archaeological record found there, which would also be put at risk if the Holtec-ELEA CISF had ever been built and operated.

In fact, as reported by the National Park Service, “White Sands has the largest collection of fossilized human footprints,” based upon which “[t]he latest research shows that humans have been living in North America and Tularosa Basin for at least 23,000 years. It was previously thought that humans arrived in North America closer to 13,500 – 16,000 years ago.” White Sands National Park in the Tularosa Basin is not far to the west of the Holtec-ELEA and ISP CISFs, straddling the New Mexico/Texas border. That area of south-central New Mexico had previously been targeted for CISF-like Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) sites, as targeted at the Mescalero Apache Reservation, first by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) infamous Nuclear Waste Negotiator, Dave Leroy, and later by the nuclear utility industry consortium, Private Fuel Storage, Ltd. (PFS).

“New Mexico has suffered serial nuclear abuse since the establishment of the Los Alamos National Lab by J. Robert Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project in 1943, which culminated with the disastrous ‘Trinity’ plutonium bomb ‘test’ blast on July 16, 1945. New Mexico suffered one of the worst radiological catastrophes in U.S. history, with the uranium mill tailings pond breach into the Rio Puerco on July 16, 1979, upstream of the Red Water Pond Road Community in the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo-Diné Nation. In its ghoulish tone deafness, NRC officially launched the Holtec CISF licensing proceeding with a Federal Register Notice published on July 16, 2018,” recounted Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a national watchdog group on the nuclear industry headquartered in Takoma Park, Maryland.

“Despite this tremendous EJ victory, we must remain vigilant. ELEA has already stated it is seeking a new partner to nuclearize its southeastern New Mexico site, including to do reprocessing. Besides being environmentally ruinous, with large-scale releases of hazardous radioactivity into the air, onto soil, and into surface waters and groundwater, the separation of fissile Plutonium-239 from highly radioactive waste via reprocessing is also a glaring nuclear weapons proliferation risk. Reprocessing is also astronomically expensive, and the public will be left holding the bag,” Kamps warned.

For its part, Holtec has also stated it will simply carry on seeking “collaborative siting” (formerly called “consent-based siting”) as part of an ongoing DOE initiative. Holtec has recently targeted Arkansas communities. Many times for the past several decades now, low-income and/or Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC) communities, especially Native American reservations, have been targeted for such schemes by the nuclear industry.

“A part of the good news here is that Holtec’s proposed barge shipments of highly radioactive waste on surface waters — such as the Hudson River past New York City; Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts Bay, and Boston Harbor in Massachusetts; Barnegat Bay and the Jersey Shore into Newark, New Jersey; and Lake Michigan — have been fended off yet again, at least for the time being. So too road and rail shipments of highly radioactive waste — potential ‘Mobile Chornobyls’ — through most states in the Lower 48. CISFs automatically double transport risks, as irradiated fuel would have to be transferred from interim storage to a permanent disposal site someday. Regarding the latter, Holtec and ISP, as well as NRC, simply assumed Yucca Mountain, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land, would serve as the permanent repository, which is outrageous,” Kamps said.

Decades of previous hard work by many hundreds of environmental, EJ, and Indigenous groups across the country fended off the permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, as well as “interim storage” at both Yucca, and the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, another aborted radioactively racist scheme in which Holtec was a partner. Holtec would have provided 4,000 storage/transport containers of dubious structural integrity to PFS on the tiny reservation west of Salt Lake City, had the dump not been stopped. But PFS was blocked, and never broke ground, despite having received an NRC license to construct and operate.

“As with Private Fuel Storage in Utah, despite NRC’s rubber stamping of the license, we have now also blocked Holtec’s CISF in New Mexico, and hope to do the same at ISP’s CISF in Texas,” Kamps said.

For more information about Holtec’s now blocked CISF in New Mexico, and Interim Storage Partners’ CISF in west Texas (just 0.3 miles from the New Mexico state line, and upstream), including our coalition’s resistance to both, see our Centralized Storage website section (2022-present). For earlier posts (2009-2022), see the Centralized Storage section at Beyond Nuclear’s archived website. And see Beyond Nuclear’s educational video, featuring Mustafa Ali (formerly President Obama’s head of EJ at EPA), and grassroots Indigenous and Latinx New Mexican voices, opposing the CISFs, and our series of backgrounders detailing the reasons for our opposition, posted here.

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