[US] A radioactive waste dump project abandonned
Published originally on the website Beyond Nuclear International
Tireless advocacy delivers victory
A grand coalition and legal support won a hard-fought struggle to stop Holtec’s radioactive waste dump, writes Kevin Kamps*
Holtec International and Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance’s (ELEA) joint scheme to construct and operate the world’s largest high-level radioactive waste dump, midway between Hobbs and Carlsbad, has been terminated. This is a hard-won environmental justice (EJ) victory, and brought about by the tireless work of countless Indigenous, as well as grassroots EJ, environmental, and public interest allies for more than a decade.Together they have successfully blocked a dangerous dump scheme and the many thousands of “Mobile Chornobyl” radioactive waste shipments its opening would have launched nationwide.
Beyond Nuclear has fought against this Holtec-ELEA consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) since it was first launched 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 own warnings and those of others and proceeded with docketing the license applications.
An artist’s rendition of what the Holtec New Mexico “interim” radioactive waste outdoor storage site would have looked like. (Image: Holtec International)
Many years of intense NRC licensing proceedings on both Holtec and ISP’s CISFs, and related environmental reviews, followed. Our coalition engaged at every step, alongside environmental allies in New Mexico, Texas, and across the country. For example, we broke 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.
The grassroots environmental coalition partners included Don’t Waste Michigan, and others […]. Together, we generated many dozens of contentions in NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board proceedings, all of which were rejected, with those rulings rapidly upheld by the NRC Commissioners despite our appeals. Our coalition, which includes an oil and ranching company, as well as the States of New Mexico and Texas, then 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.
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Our fight was significantly enhanced by members and supporters of Beyond Nuclear in New Mexico and Texas — most of them working ranchers and orchardists — who have steadfastly and for many years provided legal standing for our NRC interventions and federal court appeals.
New Mexico is a majority minority state. That is, a majority of the state’s population is Indigenous or Latinx. The Indigenous leadership provided by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, and Latinx leadership from Alliance for Environmental Strategies, greatly helped secure this environmental justice 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, just as they were also 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.
Despite this tremendous environmental justice 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.
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.
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*Kevin Kamps is the radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear.
21/10/2025