A Bad Supreme Court Decision Paves the Way for Radioactive Waste Storage in the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico

[Judi Lynn]

July 11, 2025

Bill Hatch

The great problem with nuclear energy, hidden from the public as often as possible by the federal government and special interests, is the quantities of radioactive waste nuclear reactors produce.

Nearly 100,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods are stored at the sites of 92 open and 42 closed nuclear power plants in the country and about 2,000 tons a year are added to the piles. Plans for a permanent federal storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada are mired in controversy and effective opposition. Two private firms have proposed storage sites in the Permian Basin, one in Texas, the other 40 miles away in New Mexico. One sits directly on top of the Oglala Aquifer, which provides water for millions in eight states from South Dakota to west Texas and New Mexico; the other sits immediately adjacent to the aquifer. In plain language, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act allows storage of nuclear waste either at nuclear reactor sites or at sites owned by the federal government. Environmental groups believe there is a high probability that the federal government will change the designations from temporary to permanent sites after their 40-year licenses expire.

Ninety percent of nuclear reactors are in the eastern half of the nation; the two proposed sites would generate up to 10,000 trips by road, rail or waterway of highly radioactive cargo called by residents along their routes things like “Mobile Chornobyl,” “Floating Fukushima,” “Dirty Bomb on Wheels,” and “Mobile X-ray Machine That Can’t Be Turned Off.”

In the words of Haul No!, an indigenous group based in Albuquerque, “The Southwest is under attack! Nuclear colonialism, via this push for new development of both energy and weapons, is threatening our communities…”

The U.S. Supreme Court decided on June 18 that the Texas storage project, presented as a temporary site, could receive nuclear reactor waste despite the language of the federal nuclear waste act. This decision paves the way for the further development of the New Mexico site.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/11/a-bad-supreme-court-decision-paves-the-way-for-radioactive-waste-storage-in-the-permian-basin-of-texas-and-new-mexico/

[ultralite001]

1. No...

No…
A thousand times NO…

[hunter]

2. Existing light water nuclear power plants extract just a small fraction of the potential energy in their fuel.

It's absurd to call this used fuel "waste" and bury it when we have the technology to reprocess it into fresh fuel.

There are two reasons we don't do that, the first being that mined natural uranium is cheap, the second being unjustified fears that weapons grade plutonium will be extracted from used nuclear fuels.

Extracting weapons grade plutonium or uranium from used nuclear power plant fuels is a difficult and expensive task compared to making these weapons grade materials from scratch using mined natural uranium.

Weapons grade uranium is made by separating the U-235 from the U-238 in mined natural uranium which is a mixture of both. This is what Iran has been doing.

Plutonium is produced in specialized nuclear reactors using mined natural uranium. This is what North Korea has been doing. This is how the U.S.A. made plutonium for bombs at Hanford.

If we fully utilized all the uranium that we've already mined in sophisticated nuclear fuel cycles we could power the world's industry for centuries, which would also make it more difficult to build nuclear weapons as any trade in natural uranium could be considered highly suspicious.

[NNadir]

3. It's funny how people who think so called "nuclear waste" is a problem have no concern about fossil fuel waste.

The latter kills people on a scale of millions of people per year, the former has a spectacular record of not killing anyone.

Fossil fuel waste is not, and cannot be stored anywhere. It's dumped directly into the environment, where it is engaged in destroying the planetary atmosphere.