The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday said Butte County, Idaho, lacks either a factual or legal basis to win its lawsuit against the Department of Energy over ongoing storage of certain nuclear material at the Idaho National Laboratory.
The feds want U.S. District Judge David Nye to toss the lawsuit the county, home to DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, filed in March. Local officials who sued said they might be due payments from DOE because the site holds nuclear material from a partially melted-down commercial reactor, Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2), as well as the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
The Justice Department said the county incorrectly claims that DOE set up an interim storage program under Part B of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 concerns the selection of deep geologic repositories for safe disposal of radioactive waste.
DOE acquired core material from the TMI-2 reactor under the Atomic Energy Act after the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979.
“This material presented an unprecedented opportunity for DOE to study the effects of a partial meltdown of a reactor core” and there was no better place to do that than “a cutting-edge research facility,” such as Idaho National Laboratory, Justice Department said.
DOE and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program have also managed naval spent nuclear fuel at the Idaho lab, under Atomic Energy Act authority, since the 1950s, the Justice Department said.
“DOE never used the authority provided by [the Nuclear Waste Policy Act] Part B to establish an interim storage program, and thus has not made impact assistance payments,” the Justice Department said.
The plaintiff’s “entire discussion” of naval spent nuclear fuel ignores the Atomic Energy Act “and digresses into the irrelevant topic of whether DOE intends to store naval [spent fuel] in a geologic repository in the future,” the Justice Department said.
Butte County also has not laid out any concrete harm resulting from the TMI-2 and naval nuclear material at Idaho National Laboratory, Justice said. Instead, the plaintiff has only made “vague references to ‘social and economic harm,’” the agency said.
