While Louisiana Enrichment Services (LES) maintains Trousdale County is still its first choice for building a uranium enrichment facility, a delegation from New Mexico is currently heading to LES’s plant in Holland to see if a similar plant would be appropriate for their state.

The area LES is mulling is near the city of Hobbs in Lea County in the southeast portion of New Mexico.

“The trip was arranged in response to requests from state and local officials in Lea County in New Mexico, and is being attended by various citizens and elected officials,” said LES spokesperson John Van Mol, of the public relations firm Dye, Van Mol & Lawrence.

Van Mol said the status of the Hartsville site in Trousdale County hasn’t changed.

“There will not be another designated site until a different site is decided upon. So Hartsville remains in its current status until that status changes, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what’s been going on, however,” Van Mol said.

According to a report in the Hobbs Sun-News a delegation of county commissioners, the town’s mayor, the publisher of the Hobbs Sun-News, and various legislators have left for the town of Almelo and will return on July 27.

They are expected to review the facility in the same way Trousdale County commissioners and Tennessee legislators toured the plant last November.

Hobbs Sun-News Managing Editor Daniel Russell said there has been little opposition so far to building a uranium facility in southeast New Mexico.

“This area has been talking about nuclear stuff for 20 to 30 years,” Russell said. “I have no doubt there will be some opposition, but I really think that opposition is going to be coming from folks who live five hours away up in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area. That’s where more of our environmentalist groups are located.”

Russell confirmed that LES has hired D.W. Turner, a public relations firm from Albuquerque.

Russell also said New Mexico did not have the same environmental issues that Tennessee had.

“We have followed a little bit of what has been going on over there [in Tennessee]. I guess there’s a lot of water and river issues,” Russell said. “We don’t have anything like that. In the area they are looking at there is already a hazardous waste site on the Texas side of the border.”

The reason LES is looking at the area, said Russell, is because there is no underground water or surface water to be contaminated.

As well, Hobbs is only 40 miles from Andrews, Texas, where a landfill is located. The radioactive waste called “tails” might go to the landfill after they are converted to uranium oxide.

New Mexico officials have been courting LES since learning of the controversy that began almost immediately after LES announced it had targeted the 250 acres in Hartsville more than a year ago.

U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), and chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sent a letter to LES asking that New Mexico be reconsidered as first choice for the plant.

“We are waiting for them to come back and for the LES folks to analyze and, I guess, debrief folks out in New Mexico to see if what their thought and observations were of the plant in Almelo; to see where they go from here and to see which location is more viable as far as the needs of LES,” said Jay West, liaison between LES and Trousdale County.