Oral arguments scheduled later this month on petitions for interventions and hearings in the license application for a planned spent nuclear fuel storage facility in New Mexico will not be livestreamed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission board hearing the case ruled.
Eighteen entities have filed claimed standing to intervene in Holtec International’s request for a 40-year NRC license to hold up to 173,000 metric tons of used fuel in Lea County. They will have the opportunity to make their case during a prehearing conference convened by a three-member NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on Jan. 23 and possibly Jan. 24 at the federal courthouse in Albuquerque.
Officials from the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance (ELEA), which is partnering with Holtec on the project, requested livestreaming to government meeting spaces in Eddy County and the cities of Hobbs and Carlsbad. Those three municipalities, along with Lea County, are the members of the Energy Alliance.
The organization said the chief judge and chief clerk for the U.S. District Court in Albuquerque might allow livestreaming at the request of the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board. But the board will not file such a request, Chairman Paul Ryerson wrote in a Dec. 26 order.
“The scheduled argument will consist primarily of the Board’s questions to counsel concerning specific aspects of the hundreds of pages of pleadings we have received. A complete written transcript will be available on the NRC’s public website a few days after the argument’s conclusion,” he wrote. “Although the public is welcome to attend, it will not be an opportunity for public participation; nor will it materially differ from numerous legal arguments in matters of public interest that no doubt take place regularly before the Judges of the District Court. The oral argument does not, in our view, present any good reason to request an exception to the Court’s usual practices.”
