Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Mayer pointed out the NRC’s EIS, and a section that said while there could be up to thirteen accidents amid the shipments, the likelihood of them being severe was “one in ten trillion.” Even in a severe accident the NRC “concluded no release of (spent nuclear fuel) would occur,” according to the EIS.
Mayer went on to say that “Unsubstantiated is that an accident will harm human health and the environment. It seems disingenuous. If you’re going to put a poll together, it should be a substantiated question. The opposition said each of those accidents will cause a release of radioactive material. That’s just not the case.”
Opponents, including Southwest Research maintained the project would bring an undue risk to New Mexicans nearby and Americans along the waste transportation routes. That is why opposition was spread across political parties, gender, and ethnicity according to Don Hancock, Nuclear Waste Program Manager at Southwest Research.
The poll indicated that over half of those surveyed in the region were against the project. Political affiliation had no effect on the poll results. About seventy percent of Democrats opposed Holtec. Fifty one percent of Republicans and fifty five percent of Independents opposed the project.
When broken down by gender, more men supported the project than women. A majority of Republican men polled were supportive of the project at fifty one percent. Sixty one percent of Republican women were against the project.
White men were mostly supportive of the project at forty nine percent of those polled while seventy one percent of white women were opposed. Hispanic men and women mostly opposed the project at fifty-one and seventy-eight percent against. Central, northeast and southwest N.M. showed opposition of sixty percent or more. More conservative regions of the southeast and northwest showed fifty-seven and fifty-six percent against, respectively.
Hancock said that the poll showed that temporary spent nuclear fuel storage was not supported by N.M. voters. He argued that it was opposed through decades of proposals like Holtec’s. He added that, “I’m not surprised by the results because for more than 45 years New Mexicans have strongly opposed high-level waste in New Mexico, whether the waste is proposed for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in the 1970s and ‘80s, for Mescalero Apache land in the 1990s, or by Holtec.”
Opposition to the Holtec proposal also came from some of N.M.’s highest-ranking state officials and its Congressional delegation. N.M. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham called the proposal “economic malpractice.” She pointed out that it would endanger nearby oil and gas and agricultural industries.
U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) co-sponsored a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last year to block any federal funds from the supporting such a project. At the state level, N.M. Senator Jeff Steinborn (D-36) was a major opponent of Holtec in the Legislature. Texas lawmakers recently passed a bill to ban high-level waste storage in their state. Steinborn said that N.M. policymakers should considers a similar measure to prevent the project from coming to fruition.
Steinborn said, “From the very beginning this has been a dangerous plan pushed on New Mexico, with real risks for all of our communities, and no end in sight. It's time for this project to be canceled and be replaced by the federal government committing to a true consent-based siting process for the permanent storage of this waste.”