Over a month before Spink County officially went south on the Deep Borehole Field Test, the U.S. Department of Energy went south seeking an alternative site for their engineering experiment. An eager reader points me toward a May 27 article in the Alamogordo Daily News reporting that Otero County Commissioners resisted a USDOE pitch to dig one or two 5,000-meter deep holes in the southeastern part of the county.
The reporting is sloppy. The article headlines the project as a “radioactive waste plan” and says the project was “to dispose radioactive waste in Otero County.” DOE apparently provided the same assurances to Otero County that they did to Spink County that the Deep Borehole Field Test was only to test the borehole-drilling technology and not actually dispose waste on site, but neither the Otero County Commission nor the Alamogordo Daily News believed that.
“You don’t spend $24 million to drill a hole to say we’re not going to do it. They won’t do it in phase one but in phase two they will and we will become a nuclear waste dump in Otero County,” [Otero County Commissioner Ronny] Rardin said. “They say it won’t hurt the water, that’s bull. I don’t understand why we would even consider letting them go down there and do this. I just don’t see it” [Jacqueline Devine, “Otero County Not Supporting Radioactive Waste Plan,” Alamogordo Daily News, 2016.05.27].
The article also reports that DOE had ruled out the South Dakota site “because of the lack of county commission and state support in South Dakota.” That statement came two weeks before the Spink County Commission penned its official rejection of the Borehole project. That statement also gets state support flat wrong: Governor Dennis Daugaard and School of Mines president Heather Wilson (a product of New Mexico) both lobbied for the project.
According to the agenda item submitted by Commissioner Susan Flores for the Otero County Commission May 19 meeting, the Borehole project was to employ “approximately 20 scientists from Los Alamos… and 20 local hired from Otero County.” Those forty workers would be relocated to “a self-sustainable town” at “the Dugger place in SE Otero County.” Flores wrote that a company already had a lease on the Dugger property. That company appears not to be Battelle, the project lead in South Dakota, but TerranearPMC, a company with experience in disposing radioactive waste, munitions, and explosives. TerranearPMC contractor Ken Fillman was the contact with Otero County in May; he also participated in a USDOE public input meeting on consent-based siting in Washington, DC, on September 15, which is a central topic in the revised DOE Borehole project.
Otero County, whose residents saw the flash from the first nuclear explosion at the Trinity site just northwest of their county line, rejected being a backup site for the first Borehole proposal even before the USDOE had official word from Spink County that it would need a backup site.
But now Quay County, which expressed its support last week for two other companies’ bid to bring the borehole to New Mexico, is a couple hundred miles northeast of Otero County.
Yeah, I skimmed that article a while back, and completely missed that it was referring to the deep borehole test. I’m used to standard journalistic practice that doesn’t bury the lede. There are so many of these project to bury radioactive waste floated in the west Texas and south and east New Mexico areas that it is hard to keep them all straight.
So much of the coverage in New Mexico now is about the WIPP closure and the recent cave in that will end up closing large sections of the feds only radioactive waste dump. Still, it’s inexcusable that I didn’t pay closer attention to the Otero County article.
Imagine that, consent-based processes are at work in both Otero County and Quay County.
If your issue is groundwater, that effect can be measured. You don’t have to take anybody’s word on it, and you can even run an independent experiment.
Use a radiotracer, as they do in agricultural research. First do some measurements to monitor the natural background levels. Take some water samples, do some radiochemistry to isolate the radiotracer. If you cannot distinguish the signal from the natural background, then you cannot say there is a pathway to said water source.
The catch is really how long do you need to wait before collecting a sample. A hydrologist and/or a geologist could probably tell you.
False news. Quay county has overwhelmingly rejected this project. From the county commissioners to the state representatives to all the local residents nobody wants this in quay county
I appreciate the update, Bill. However, at the time of this post, the news was accurate.
http://www.exchangemonitor.com/publication/rwm/otero-county-n-m-punts-on-resolution-opposing-borehole-test/
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/storing-nuclear-waste-offers-economic-potential-environmental-risks/article_d9fdef98-850d-5638-930d-89486533f0b2.html
Thanks for the links doc. No one is for this boondoggle. From your link. Also note the worry about the Ogallala Aquifer with permanent contamination of use lost forever. Someone needs to get that feller up here to South Dakota to discuss the Keystone XL with our dummies so they can take the news to our head dummy.
“Kent Satterwhite, manager of the Sanford, Texas-based Canadian River Municipal Water Authority, wrote to Quay County to express concerns over the project. The Canadian River supplies drinking water to 500,000 people and runs through Eastern New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. As a tributary of the Arkansas River, which flows into the Mississippi River, the water of the Canadian River eventually reaches the Gulf of Mexico.
Also, below ground there is the Ogallala Aquifer, which intersects with eight Western states from Texas to South Dakota.
“If there were an accidental release,” Satterwhite wrote, “ … all surface waters, agricultural lands, etc. in the region could be essentially lost forever.”
At the end of recent meetings in Logan, Tucumcari and Dalhart, Texas, organizers asked members of the public to raise their hands in support of the project. No one did.”
Jerry,
Otero County punted on a resolution that would oppose the borehole. One commissioner is pretty against it, one has received a lot of positive messages, and the other leans against it. So to say that absolutely everyone is against it is a mischaracterization. Saying that more people have shown up at meetings to oppose it than support it at the meetings is fair.
The other article is pretty much down the middle. They do a good job at summarizing the views of the opposition as well as the potential benefits that nuclear waste facilities would bring. It should be clear that there are parallel initiatives for temporary storage facilities in New Mexico that would have nothing to do with the borehole test. Even the opponents in New Mexico believe that no waste is coming with this test….they just don’t trust the government after this test.
I think this defense wastes (which once again is NOT the 99+% of waste that comes from commercial plants) is going somewhere other than the test sites. They will work their way to more complicated geologies that have fewer transportation issues and where their security measures will be optimal.
If you are pro-science, then you should be pro-borehole-test. It’s just that you may not like the conclusions that the science generates…such as this means of waste storage is safe. And heck, a South Dakota company and SDSMT faculty would be world leaders in this technique as a result. But instead you want to prevent the possibility of that kind of conclusion from being drawn in the first place.
Whether or not it is more economical to use boreholes as opposed to Yucca Mountain-style facilities for current defense wastes or future engineered commercial wastes is better ground for you to walk on, but that will not be clear until after the full testing has occurred.
If you are that set against nuclear waste storage in South Dakota, then you should be actively working to lock up South Dakota for boreholes used for geothermal energy instead. You likely cannot do both at the same location.
Some pro-nuclear momentum in Finland, jerry. They actually are storing their waste and working on deep underground disposal in a cost-effective manner.
“Last week, four municipal election candidates from the traditionally anti-nuclear Green Party in Finland published an opinion piece in which they stated that humanity no longer has the luxury of opposing nuclear power.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/04/17/finlands-green-party-and-nuclear-power-really/