Imagine the potential horrors of the derailment of a train in East Palestine, Ohio, last month, if it had freight cars carrying casks of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods on the way to a waste disposal site near Carlsbad, New Mexico, as proposed by Holtec International of Jupiter, Florida.
Or, worse, imagine the havoc that could have resulted from an accident involving a truck carrying such spent fuel rods. It could happen on any one of the innumerable crumbling stretches of I-40 or 1-25, or on one of the 846 miles of U.S. 85, the main north/south road to Carlsbad, known locally as the Death Highway, so prone it is to fatal accidents. We’ve been told by Holtec that trucks won’t be used to carry highly radioactive loads to New Mexico, though trucks are used to carry low-level waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) nearby. The Holtec plan is that all dangerously hot nuclear waste is supposed to be delivered by train. But “supposed to” has proved to be a relatively meaningless term when it comes to the nuclear establishment doing what it will in New Mexico.
Train derailments and trucking accidents are so frequent in the United States that transporting really hot nuclear waste is roughly like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the magazine. The derailment of the hazardous waste train in East Palestine was one of 54,539 derailments in the country over the last thirty two years. That averages out to 1,704 derailments a year. And in 2020, the United States saw 4,842 large truck accidents that killed some 4,014 people, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA). As horrible as that is, it’s nothing compared to the 107,000 large truck accidents that the FMCSA says resulted in injuries that year. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that transporting spent nuclear fuel rods from storage sites, spread out in 75 towns and countrysides mostly east of the Mississippi, could put incalculable numbers of Americans at unnecessary risk of lethal radioactive exposures should a train derailment or large truck accident take place.
But the movers and shakers in Carlsbad and other southeastern New Mexico cities appear not to be worried about such potential catastrophes around the country or in our state itself. In their support of Holtec’s $3 billion plan to build an “interim storage site” for spent nuclear fuel rods there’s never any mention of the dangers involved. Business leaders there are adamant that the Holtec plan is good for all New Mexicans. But seeing as how southeast New Mexico (Eddy, Lea, Otero and Chavez counties) has only a around 256,000 people, or about an 8th of the state’s population, these leaders do not speak for the people of the whole state, most of whom find the Holtec plan full of potential peril.
It’s important to remember that just because nuclear fuel rods are “spent” it doesn’t mean they are safe. It’s quite the opposite in fact. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, spent nuclear fuel rods are more dangerous than before they were used to boil water in reactors because they contain wastes in the form of isotopes of plutonium and other highly radioactive materials. Spent rods could have a half-life of more than 24,000 years. They give off about a million rems of radiation per hour at a short distance, enough to kill you in a matter of seconds. It’s estimated there are more than 30 million such rods, or some 86,000 metric tons, in the United States. stored in spent fuel pools at the nation’s commercial nuclear power plants. The DOE estimates that some 2,000 metric tons of spend fuel is generated in the United States each year. And it’s clear that no transportation network is fail-safe, even the best of them.
One can get a rough, low-end idea of how many shipping trips it might take to get all or most of the nation’s spent fuel rods to Carlsbad by considering that since 1999, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, has received some 13,000 shipments with about 185,000 55-gallon waste containers of low level “transuranic” waste from nuclear labs around the country. WIPP’s supporters are proud to report that those shipments have covered more than 15 million “loaded miles” without an accident.
There have been some anomalies, however. According to the Carlsbad Current-Argus, a truck carrying nuclear waste from Idaho “left the road in Wyoming” going to WIPP in 2002. It was chalked up to driver error. No nuclear waste was spilled, a spokesman for the DOE told the Current-Argus. In 2006, the Albuquerque Journal said that a loaded truck with nuclear waste for WIPP was rear ended by a pickup truck near Pocatello, Idaho, with no release of radiation. And in 2008, a truck on its way to WIPP “drove off” I-25 and plowed through a snow fence north of Las Vegas, NM. No one was hurt and, again, no radiation was released, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, reports. We’ve been lucky so far.
But the low-level waste that goes to WIPP and their hot, high-level waste that would go to the Holtec storage site are not the same at all. Just one accident with highly radioactive waste could be a catastrophe that dwarfs the derailment and hazardous spills in East Palestine. The risk is astronomically too high, particularly if at some point all that dangerous waste will have to be moved again to a permanent storage site outside of New Mexico.
The Holtec plan to “temporarily” store spent fuel rods has met with powerful opposition from members of the New Mexico delegation in the U.S. Congress and currently from opponents in the state legislature. And for good reason. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) “believes there is no pressing safety or security reason to mandate” moving spent rods from pools into harden casks, the containers required to move them to be stored near Carlsbad.
In May last year, a bipartisan group of New Mexico and Texas legislators introduced a bill that would prohibit federal funding for any temporary corporate storage of hazardous nuclear waste. It was sponsored by New Mexico U.S. Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernandez, U.S. Sens Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. This January, Searchlight New Mexico reports that a bill was introduced into the State Senate by Democrat Jeff Steinborn, and in the State House by Dem. Rep. Matthew McQueen that would prohibit “state agencies from issuing permits” to waste storage sites like the one proposed by Holtec.
Let’s hope these bills, that echo the concerns of the majority of New Mexicans, can prevail over the adamant few in southeast New Mexico, and keep them and Holtec from turning our state into a national nuclear sacrifice zone.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Thank you V. B. for another important column. I have been worried about the transportation of nuclear waste–whatever its level–for years. And I have protested the existence of WIPP in the southern part of our state. Serious accidents happen, are briefly reported, and then obscured by the next crisis on the horizon. The production, transportation and storage of nuclear waste are harrowing accidents waiting to happen. We must be relentless in our opposition to nuclear weaponry.
Thank you for this, V.B. The only thing more toxic than plutonium is this insane capitalist system, a fatal virus manifesting as an unquenchable, rabid desire to make more and more money no matter the consequences, including the destruction of the environment and our children’s future. If there were no monetary incentives involved, we would be making more rational decisions.
Excellent report, V.B.
Let me start by saying that I oppose the proposal to store spent fuel in New Mexico.
However, using the data from this report (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/historical-review-safe-transport-spent-nuclear-fuel), it is possible to do two things that indicate that the likelihood of an accident that exposes people to radiation is small, perhaps vanishingly small: 1) understand the chances that spent fuel containers would rupture in an accident, and 2) understand the chances that a load of spent fuel would be in a derailment. My reading of this report would indicate that regarding point 1), the chances of releasing dangerous spent fuel in an accident is small, and regarding point 2), the chances that a load of spent fuel would be in a derailment is probably less than one in one hundred per year; i.e., in 100 years, less than one such accident could be expected(consequential, but not awful).
However, there are other concerns that are not as easily quantifiable. For example, the chances that an unforeseen accident might occur, analogous to the accident that shut down WIPP for a year or two. Or other unforeseen events having to do with the handling of the spent fuel casks when they are installed into the facility being proposed for development in New Mexico. Why should New Mexico be exposed to such possibilities. We have done enough to bear the consequences of the nuclear age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffbsw2JkOmw
This is how some see NM
The Song there is a hole in the bucket rings true no mater where you live in the US.
You may be troubled about the transport of highly radioactive materials.
Reality check, where I live by it, I am but a few miles from The famous Diablo Canyon Power Plant, it is in our backyard. We live in a beautiful place, where if the plant blows we will be evaporated.
All the stores in the area have stickers on the door swaying warning to listen for the sirens. If they go off we tune in on a radio station.
We when we fill the tank it is only 1/2 empty, so we have gas to get us out. However where we live there are only 2 roads out of town, north and east, unless we have a power boat. They were talking about closing it but now claim there is not enough solar to replace it??
And all that spent fuel is buried there. I don’t get to be re-leaved it is going to someone else’s backyard. Yes there is a hole in the bucket.
And everyone wants taxes cut and what do they pay fo? Let’s start with better roads, Gov. Departments making sure railroads are fixing things right, helping the poor, keeping us safe.
I grew up in NM and was use to seeing a house with a sign saying stay out Nuclear waste. The first bomb went off there. I always wanted a giggler counter. Enough to make you go take a shower, just in case.
Google: YouTube amount of nuclear energy found in New Mexico there are several to choose from.
What needs to be seen is improved roads everywhere and educating people about what this article is about.