Walt Rubel Commentary: State gets Holtec to cry “uncle”

New Mexico may not become the nation’s nuclear dump site after all. I suppose that’s a good thing.

Holtec International spokesman Patrick O’Brien announced last week that it is giving up on plans to build a nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad, “due to the untenable path forward for used fuel storage in New Mexico.”

It’s a big win for state legislators who made the path untenable.

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission was well aware of the state’s opposition to the facility when it approved a license in 2023 that would have allowed for the storage and transfer of 500 canisters holding approximately 8,600 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel for up to 40 years.

That fits the pattern. The feds didn’t warn residents of the Tularosa Basin before detonating the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site, and are just now finally getting around to compensating the descendants. And, they already have one storage site in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.

Legislation sponsored by Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces, prohibits the storage or disposal of nuclear waste unless the state has consented to the facility; and denies issuance of all permits needed to construct and operate the facility.

While the end of this pursuit will come as a disappointment to the wealthy businessmen of the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance who had partnered with Holtec on the planned facility, for the rest of us it feels like a small victory at a time when we’re getting bulldozed by the federal government.

But it leaves the nation no closer to a permanent solution for the storage of nuclear waste.

When Congress selected Yucca Mountain in Nevada to be the nation’s waste repository in 1987, it was a decision based on politics, not geology. Harry Reid was just a freshman senator, and Nevada lacked the political clout to stop the plan from being passed. By the time the project was halted, Reid was the majority leader.

Dr. James Conca, former director of the Environmental Monitoring and Research Center at WIPP, explained during a community radio interview in 2024 that underground nuclear waste storage requires finding the “right rock.” Yucca Mountain was never going to work because it’s in a seismically active area that is prone to earthquakes and has underground faults and fractures that risk water contamination.

“I worked for 25 years trying to make a lousy rock work,” he said 

He wasn’t alone. We’ve spent about $15 billion on the facility, and that does not include the billions of dollars paid by the government to nuclear power companies in legal settlements for failure to comply with the contract to store their spent fuel.

It’s estimated that as of 2021 we had generated about 86,000 metric tons of spent fuel. Most of it is being stored in dry casks made of steel and concrete at more than 70 sites around the country. That doesn’t seem like a solution.

Conca thinks WIPP is the right rock. I toured the facility several years ago, and came away convinced that it was as safe as we can get. But, of course, that was the point of the tour. Opponents say oil drilling and fracking in the region make storage unsafe.

We will need to decide on a storage site at some point. And when we do, it’s going to be in somebody’s backyard.


Walter Rubel can be reached at [email protected]

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