A federal court in Washington was scheduled Thursday to hear oral arguments in a joint lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over a proposed commercial storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in west Texas.
Thursday’s oral argument in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should prove an opportunity for a coalition of anti-nuclear groups, including Don’t Waste Michigan and Beyond Nuclear, to lodge their objections to NRC’s September 2021 decision to license Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposed site in Andrews, Texas. The anti-nukers have also taken issue with the agency’s refusal to hold a public hearing on the proposed ISP project while the agency was deliberating a licensing decision.
The coalition has argued that NRC ran afoul of the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) when it approved the proposed ISP site. NWPA bars the federal government from building interim storage facilities until a permanent nuclear waste repository is online — currently, no such repository exists.
NRC has countered that it is governed by the Atomic Energy Act, not NWPA, and that that law gives it the authority to license away-from-reactor spent fuel storage sites such as the proposed ISP project.
The agency has also said that because it rejected the anti-nukers’ administrative petitions, they have no right to sue. The window for stakeholder participation “opens once, and only once,” NRC said in an August court brief.
The D.C. federal court could also hear litigation Thursday over the Supreme Court’s June ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, which Beyond Nuclear in July attempted to link to the interim storage lawsuit.
Beyond Nuclear argued at the time that the high-court’s decision meant that NRC would need congressional approval to authorize an interim storage facility in Texas. The commission has said that the ruling did not apply to its licensing decision.
The ISP site, if built, could store around 40,000 tons of spent fuel — about half of the country’s total spent fuel inventory of close to 90,000 tons. NRC licensed the site to operate for 40 years.
