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(Reuters) - When Stan Rounds heard about U.S. President Joe Biden’s plans to suspend new drilling on federal lands to fight climate change, he worried about the education budget.
FILE PHOTO: Drilling rigs operate in the Permian Basin oil and natural gas production area in Lea County, New Mexico, U.S., February 10, 2019. Picture taken February 10, 2019. REUTERS/Nick Oxford/File Photo
Rounds heads a state association of school administrators. He knows that New Mexico - home to the country’s richest oil fields on federal lands - depends heavily on drilling revenues to finance its struggling public schools. And budgets have already taken a hit from falling crude prices as the coronavirus pandemic sapped global fuel demand.
(Adds dropped letter to administrators in 2nd paragraph) By Nichola Groom, Valerie Volcovici and Jennifer Hiller Feb 9 (Reuters) - When Stan Rounds he.
Michael Benanav / Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here by permission.
For most New Mexico businesses, the arrival of COVID-19 wreaked havoc, caused shutdowns or threatened doom. But for one enterprise potentially one of the world’s largest nuclear waste sites the pandemic offered an unusual opportunity.
A long-planned nuclear waste storage facility in the southeastern New Mexico desert was rushed through the approval process during the pandemic, according to New Mexico’s congressional delegation, environmentalists and other opponents.
Typically, project foes would have been able to voice their disapproval at Nuclear Regulatory Commission hearings around the state. The coronavirus brought an end to such public gatherings, however, so New Mexico lawmakers asked the NRC to pause the hearings.
Nuclear Rubberstamping Commission rushes to approve Holtec’s New Mexico nuclear waste plan
Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has categorically denounced the Holtec project and all other proposals to store nuclear waste in the area.
there are “no plans of ever removing” the waste. “We see no reason,” they said, “to rush a decision that affects generations of New Mexicans during a pandemic on behalf of an international, for-profit corporation.”
New Mexico’s nuclear rush,
A massive nuclear waste site near Carlsbad is seemingly on a fast track. Can the company behind it be trusted? S
This article was reported in collaboration with the Institute of American Indian Arts’ journalism