Loving County in remote West Texas is the latest community to consider hosting the type of interim spent fuel storage facility supported by the Obama administration as an alternative to the mothballed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.
The New York Times profiled the 95-resident, 650-square-mile county last week after a company called Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiatives began negotiations with a landowner there for a potential site. Loving's county seat, Mentone, is 50 to 60 miles from Waste Control Specialists' low-level nuclear waste site near Andrews, Texas, and from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and Urenco USA uranium enrichment plant. New Mexico's Eddy and Lea counties, where WIPP and the Urenco plant are sited, respectively, have expressed interest in hosting spent fuel. With the economic benefits a storage facility could bring, and the possibility that waste storage would be built relatively nearby anyway, the lawyers that formed Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiatives found most people in Loving County supportive of the prospect of hosting the spent fuel. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has appeared supportive of the idea as well, ordering legislators to study the issue.
An interim site would require about 400 acres to centralize dry casks of spent fuel that is currently stored at nuclear plants around the country, according to the Times. A group in South Carolina raised the possibility of building an interim storage site in the state last year, but the idea failed to gain the endorsement of an advisory board. A year ago, the Mississippi Energy Institute also made the case that spent fuel storage could bring investment and job creation to that state.