Beyond Nuclear demands full disclosure from NRC & Holtec re: NM centralized interim storage facility application

Beyond Nuclear's legal counsel, Diane Curran and Mindy Goldstein, have written a letter to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). They have demanded disclosure of broad categories of documentation currently being withheld from the public as "proprietary," in the Holtec International/Eddy-Lea [Counties] Energy Alliance (ELEA) application to construct and operate a highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel centralized interim storage facility (CISF) in southeast New Mexico.

Curran is a partner at Harmon, Curran, Spielberg + Eisenberg LLP in Washington, D.C. Goldstein serves as director of Emory University's Turner Environmental Law Clinic in Atlanta, GA.

Curran and Goldstein regard the broad scope of the document withholding as unprecedented. They have contrasted it with the transparency of the Private Fuel Storage, LLC (PFS) CISF application 20 years ago.

(PFS, targeted at the Skull Valley Goshute Indian Reservation in Utah, was ultimately blocked, despite an NRC rubber-stamp to construct and operate the CISF. The scheme proposed parking 40,000 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel in Holtec containers on the tiny, low income Indian community of just over 100 adult tribal members. PFS was regarded as a blatant example of environmental injustice, or radioactive racism.)

The letter follows a similar Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the publication of the same documentation, submitted by Curran and Goldstein last week on behalf of Beyond Nuclear.

Beyond Nuclear and its legal counsel have also requested that NRC not docket the application (that is, declare it complete, and thus initiate the licensing proceeding), nor hold environmental scoping public comment hearings, nor begin the 60-day deadline countdown clock for legal interventions, in opposition to the Holtec/ELEA CISF, until all requested documentation has been made publicly available.

Holtec/ELEA proposes to store, on an "interim" basis that could last more than a century, up to 120,000 metric tons of commercial irradiated nuclear fuel, and high-level radioactive waste. That is 50% more commercial irradiated nuclear fuel than currently exists in the U.S. In addition, Holtec and ELEA made clear at a Capitol Hill press conference in Washington, D.C. marking the filing of its license application to NRC in spring 2017, its hope to reprocess that irradiated nuclear fuel at its facility in southeast NM.

(Reprocessing is a very bad idea. Nightmarish real world experience from La Hague, France to West Valley, New York makes this clear. It is astronomically expensive -- and the public will be looked to, to pay for it. It risks nuclear weapons proliferation. It is ruinous for the environment, discharging large-scale hazardous radioactive contamination to the air and surface water. It does not do away with the need for a permanent solution to the high-level radioactive waste problem. The post-reprocessing, re-solidified liquid high-level radioactive wastes would have still have to be buried in a deep geologic repository (that is scientifically suitable, environmentally just, consent-based, legal, regionally equitable, transportable to, etc.) that currently does not exist, and still eludes us, after 75 years of high-level radioactive waste generation. And the whole purpose of this reprocessing, supposedly -- other than Holtec/ELEA's money-making at public expense -- would be to fuel a new generation of atomic reactors (such as Holtec's own touted Small Modular Reactors, SMRs), which is, on its face, a very bad idea to begin with.)

See Beyond Nuclear's press statement in response to Holtec/ELEA's spring 2017 press conference on Capitol Hill.