Michael Benanav / Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here by permission.
For most New Mexico businesses, the arrival of COVID-19 wreaked havoc, caused shutdowns or threatened doom. But for one enterprise potentially one of the world’s largest nuclear waste sites the pandemic offered an unusual opportunity.
A long-planned nuclear waste storage facility in the southeastern New Mexico desert was rushed through the approval process during the pandemic, according to New Mexico’s congressional delegation, environmentalists and other opponents.
Typically, project foes would have been able to voice their disapproval at Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings around the state. The coronavirus brought an end to such public gatherings, however, so New Mexico lawmakers asked the NRC to pause the hearings.
Nuclear Rubberstamping Commission rushes to approve Holtec’s New Mexico nuclear waste plan
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has categorically denounced the Holtec project and all other proposals to store nuclear waste in the area.
there are “no plans of ever removing” the waste. “We see no reason,” they said, “to rush a decision that affects generations of New Mexicans during a pandemic on behalf of an international, for-profit corporation.”
New Mexico’s nuclear rush,
A massive nuclear waste site near Carlsbad is seemingly on a fast track. Can the company behind it be trusted? S
This article was reported in collaboration with the Institute of American Indian Arts’ journalism
This article was reported in collaboration with the Institute of American Indian Arts’ journalism program.
For most New Mexico businesses, the arrival of COVID-19 wreaked havoc, caused shutdowns or threatened doom. But for one enterprise potentially one of the world’s largest nuclear waste sites the pandemic offered an unusual opportunity.
A long-planned nuclear waste storage facility in the southeastern New Mexico desert was rushed through the approval process during the pandemic, according to New Mexico’s congressional delegation, environmentalists and other opponents.
Typically, project foes would have been able to voice their disapproval at Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings around the state. The coronavirus brought an end to such public gatherings, however, so New Mexico lawmakers asked the NRC to pause the hearings.
In December 2020, Indigenous advocates and allies from around the world joined a virtual town hall on the last operating conventional uranium mill in the United States. The White Mesa uranium mill sits on the doorstep of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, just a few miles up the road from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s White Mesa community, and has been flying under the radar as a de facto dumping ground for low-level radioactive waste for decades.
The town hall, called “Indigenous People and Environmental Justice at White Mesa: Confronting the Last Uranium Mill in the U.S.,” gave attendees a chance to learn about the White Mesa Ute community’s and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe s struggle against uranium pollution, as well as more about the nuclear fuel cycle’s impacts to Indigenous communities.