Tireless advocacy delivers victory

October 19, 2025 by beyondnuclearinternational

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.

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, et al. (Citizens’ Environmental Coalition of New York, Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination in Michigan, Demanding Nuclear Abolition (formerly Nuclear Issues Study Group) of New Mexico, Nuclear Energy Information Service in Illinois, Public Citizen’s Texas Office, San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace of California, and Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition in Texas), as well as Sierra Club chapters in New Mexico and Texas. 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.

Although the Supreme Court ruled last June that Texas and the oil/ranching company lacked standing, the merits of the dump opponents’ cases, including Beyond Nuclear’s, have never had their day in court. Beyond Nuclear is considering further appeals of adverse rulings by the federal courts thus far, in an attempt to address the CISFs’ violation of such laws as the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

This work could not have been done without yeoman efforts bye our attorneys, Diane Curran of Harmon Curran in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Invaluable legal support also came from Wally Taylor, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based attorney who served as legal counsel for Sierra Club, as well as Terry Lodge, the Toledo, Ohio-based attorney who served as legal counsel for Don’t Waste Michigan, et al., in these proceedings.

We benefitted from a number of expert witnesses who served Sierra Club and Don’t Waste Michigan, et al., including: the late Robert Alvarez of Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.; Dr. James David Ballard, a retired California State University, Northridge professor (see his report, here); Dr. Marvin Resnikoff of Radioactive Waste Management Associates in Vermont; and Dr. Gordon Thompson of Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Massachusetts.

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……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

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.

(T-shirt design at left by the late Noel Marquez)

A part of the good news here is that Holtec’s proposed barge shipments of highly radioactive waste on surface waters — such as the Hudson River past New York City; Cape Cod Bay, Massachusetts Bay, and Boston Harbor in Massachusetts; Barnegat Bay and the Jersey Shore into Newark, New Jersey; and Lake Michigan — have been fended off yet again, at least for the time being.

So have the potential road and rail shipments of highly radioactive waste — potential ‘Mobile Chornobyls’ — through most states in the Lower 48. CISFs automatically double transport risks, as irradiated fuel would have to be transferred from interim storage to an eventual permanent disposal site.

Regarding the latter, Holtec and ISP, as well as NRC, outrageously assumed Yucca Mountain, Nevada, on Western Shoshone land, would serve as the permanent repository.

Decades of previous hard work by many hundreds of environmental, EJ, and Indigenous groups across the country fended off the permanent repository at Yucca Mountain, as well as “interim storage” at both Yucca, and the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, another aborted radioactively racist scheme in which Holtec was a partner. Holtec would have provided 4,000 storage/transport containers of dubious structural integrity to PFS on the tiny reservation west of Salt Lake City, had the dump not been stopped. But PFS was blocked, and never broke ground, despite having received an NRC construction and operating license.

As with Private Fuel Storage in Utah, despite NRC’s rubber stamping of the license, we have now also blocked Holtec’s CISF in New Mexico, and hope to do the same at ISP’s CISF in Texas.

For more information about Holtec’s now blocked CISF in New Mexico, and Interim Storage Partners’ CISF in west Texas (just 0.3 miles from the New Mexico state line, and upstream), including our coalition’s resistance to both, see our Centralized Storage website section (2022-present). For earlier posts (2009-2022), see the Centralized Storage section at Beyond Nuclear’s archived website. And see Beyond Nuclear’s educational video, featuring Mustafa Ali (formerly President Obama’s head of EJ at EPA), and grassroots Indigenous and Latinx New Mexican voices, opposing the CISFs, and our series of backgrounders detailing the reasons for our opposition, posted here. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/10/19/tireless-advocacy-delivers-victory/