carlsbad current-argus

This week, we’re talking to Lucas Peerman, the outgoing news director of the Las Cruces Sun-News, and Jessica Onsurez. Until recently, Jessica was the news director of the Carlsbad Current-Argus, the Alamogordo Daily News and the Ruidoso News — a role she'll continue into 2023. All of the aforementioned papers are owned and operated by Gannett — the largest newspaper company in the United States.

On Jan. 1, Jessica took over as the news director for the Sun-News. We’ll talk to Lucas about his time at the paper and his future plans, and to Jessica about how she intends to pick up the torch and carry it forward — what this might mean for the future of the newspaper.

This week, I’m grateful to have Lucas and Jessica joining us.

In this week’s episode, we’re talking to Leah Romero, who covers trending stories for the Las Cruces Sun-News — and NOTHING is more “trending” this time of year than Hatch Green Chile. We’re also joined by Adrian Hedden of the Carlsbad Current-Argus, who recently wrote about the chile crop — and the commencement of roasting — around the state.

This year, the annual Hatch Chile Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary. Leah has been working to track down residents who were there for the iconic festival’s beginnings. Adrian has been covering the upspring of chile roasters around Southeast New Mexico. Sometimes, the chile being roasted is from Hatch; other times, it’s from the Pecos Valley — which also grows some respectable green chile.

Leah and Adrian were kind enough to join us this week to discuss their coverage of these events.

This week, we’re talking about nuclear waste. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of news on this front, most of which is coming out of southeast New Mexico. The region has a long history with nuclear waste — dating back to the mid-1970s, when the area was first selected to be the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. There were bumps in the road along the way — lots of them, in fact. And it wasn’t until 1999 that WIPP received its first actual shipment of nuclear waste.

Now, new talks are underway about a second storage facility in the area — the consolidated interim storage facility. The proposed storage facility in New Mexico would ultimately have a capacity to hold up to 100,000 metric tons of spent nuclear at the surface in southeast New Mexico. One New Jersey-based company intends to transport its waste about 1,400 miles to the facility.

Additionally, New Mexico State University recently received millions of dollars in federal Department of Energy grants to explore the possibility of recycling nuclear waste.

We talk to reporter Adrian Hedden, the energy reporter from the Carlsbad Current-Argus — who frequently writes about nuclear waste — about big changes afoot for southeast New Mexico, which appears poised to become the nuclear storage capital of the world.