A heated row broke out between US Senators during an Appropriations Committee debate on whether to use a site in southeast New Mexico to temporarily store the nation’s nuclear waste, pending a permanent repository site being found. Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina, tried to block funding for a nuclear waste interim storage programme in retaliation for the Energy Department’s decision to shut the MOX facility at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site. He was supported by New Mexico Senator Tim Udall, but they were lone voices in the debate Pushing through the proposal for a temporary store Senator Diane Feinstein noted that since the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste permanent storage facility in Nevada was politically dead, funding for temporary waste storage was needed instead.
GDF Watch 28th May 2018 read more »
Over the past two decades, southeastern New Mexico has embraced an industry many other communities throughout the country have rejected. Following more than 20 years of proposals, studies and battles, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) opened near Carlsbad in 1999 to store nuclear weapons waste underground. Then, in 2010, a uranium enrichment plant opened in Eunice. And boosters have floated other ideas, including a nuclear waste reprocessing plant. Most recently, a group of local politicians and businessmen invited a private company to store high-level waste from commercial nuclear power plants on a thousand acres between Carlsbad and Hobbs.
NM Political Report 29th May 2018 read more »
