Federal regulators have approved a private company’s plan to store nuclear waste in the oil fields of West Texas, the latest move in the continuing saga of where to store spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power plants.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Sept. 13 issued a license to Interim Storage Partners LLC (ISP), a joint venture of Orano CIS LLC and Waste Control Specialists LLC, to put a storage repository—known as a consolidated interim storage facility, or CISF—in the Permian Basin, the nation’s most prolific oil-producing region. The site could hold as much as 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste.
