Federal judges on Tuesday ruled against environmental groups who said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission illegally licensed Holtec International to store spent nuclear fuel in New Mexico.
The ruling was part of a lawsuit filed in 2021 in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and is separate from a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court that invalidated Holtec’s license as part of a 2023 ruling in Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The high court is an independent branch of the federal government.
In the D.C. circuit case, plaintiffs said NRC broke the law by giving Holtec an interim storage license that could have been used to store civilian spent fuel owned by DOE. Because DOE is not legally allowed to take custody of spent fuel before it builds a permanent repository for such material, any license allowing a license holder to take custody of DOE-titled fuel was illegal, plaintiffs said.
Not so, said a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit, who said the NRC “properly rejected” that argument, which the environmental groups raised with the commission before escalating their contention of Holtec’s license to court.
Holtec intended to use its license only “for the lawful storage of privately owned spent fuel, and only the conditional storage of DOE-titled fuel if such storage became lawful,” the D.C. Circuit judges wrote in a 21-page opinion published Tuesday on the court’s online docket.
The plaintiffs in the D.C. Circuit suit were anti-nuclear groups Beyond Nuclear and the Sierra Club. Joining the suit as intervenors were the mineral rights group Fasken Land and Minerals and Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners, both of Midland, Texas, and both also involved in the pending Supreme Court review of the Fifth Circuit case.