A federal court will rule on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s request to toss a state lawsuit over a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel “as soon as possible,” according to minutes from a hearing held last week.
The Jan. 20 hearing was the latest turn in New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas’s lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico against Holtec International’s proposed site in Eddy County, N.M. The judge in the case decided to hear NRC’s motion to dismiss before moving on with the lawsuit.
Balderas’s suit hinges on the argument that NRC would violate the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) if it licensed Holtec’s proposed site before the federal government builds a permanent spent fuel repository.
NRC says that because the agency derives its authority from the Atomic Energy Act (AEA), not the NWPA, the commission can license private interim storage facilities, as it has already done with Interim Storage Partners’ proposed site in west Texas. The partnership is a team of Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists, which owns the land where the Texas depot would be built.
In Balderas’ suit and others, the NRC has argued, and some experts agreed, that NWPA’s restrictions only apply to federally-owned interim storage sites and not ones run by private companies like Holtec or Interim Storage Partners, which Balderas has separately sued.
As a judge mulls NRC’s motion to dismiss Balderas’s case, the agency is still working on reviewing Holtec’s license application after several delays. An agency spokesperson told Exchange Monitor Jan. 3 that staff are still working on their third round of information requests for Holtec, needed to complete required safety and environmental reviews of the proposed interim storage site.
The commission had planned to finish those surveys and make a final licensing decision in January. But in November, NRC told Holtec the agency still needed more information from the company. NRC also delayed its review of Holtec’s facility in March for similar reasons.
