New Mexico state legislators, and All Pueblo Council of Governors, speak out against Holtec CISF
November 7, 2019
admin
The Santa Fe New Mexican has reported on NM state legislators taking a stand against the Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) targeted at their state. The article reports: Pending federal approval, Holtec would store some 10,000 200-ton canisters underground on a 1,000-acre desert facility "35 miles from the nearest human habitat," according to the company's website. The drums of waste would come to New Mexico by train. (emphasis added) That's an odd thing for Holtec to say. Beyond Nuclear's members and supporters, who have provided legal standing for our intervention in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensing proceeding, live and work within just a few, to several, miles of the targeted site for Holtec's CISF; one lives just a mile away. In addition, countless millions of Americans, in most states, live along the road, rail, and/or waterway transport routes that would be used to ship high-level radioactive wastes (HLRWs) to southeastern NM. On Sept. 5, 2019, the former head of Environmental Justice (EJ) at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mustafa Ali, warned on Democracy Now! that such HLRW trucks, trains, and/or barges, would themselves be yet another EJ violation, as they pass through countless low income, people of color communities. Such shipments would go on for not years, but decades. It seems that for Holtec, certain people just don't count, when there are many billions of dollars to be made -- albeit, yet again, at public expense! (Not to mention risk, and liability!) But it's not just NM state legislators opposed to Holtec's CISF. In June 2019, NM's governor, public lands commissioner, and U.S. Rep., Deb Haaland (a Democrat, one of the first two Native American women ever elected to Congress, in 2018), all spoke out strongly against Holtec. In addition, the All Pueblo Council of Governors did so as well, against Holtec as well as the Interim Storage Partners CISF at Waste Control Specialists in Texas, on October 21, 2019.