A federal district judge in Idaho has penciled in an Oct. 30 hearing date to consider the U.S. government’s motion to throw out Butte County’s lawsuit against the Department of Energy.
The case, scheduled for 11 a.m. Mountain Time at the Pocatello, Idaho federal courthouse, will be presided over by U.S. District Court Judge David Nye, according to a brief online order.
The case brought in March by Butte County, which is home to DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory, involves ongoing storage of certain nuclear material. DOE says the case does not belong in court because the county failed to state a claim the court is empowered to rule on.
Country officials have said Butte might be due financial payments from DOE because the site holds nuclear material from the partially melted-down Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor in Pennsylvania, as well as the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program.
In defending DOE, the Department of Justice said the county has wrongly asserted DOE established an interim storage program at the Idaho National Laboratory under a provision of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That portion of the act concerns selection of a deep underground storage repository, Justice said.
The material from the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown has benefitted government research at the Idaho National Laboratory, Justice said. The federal government lawyers also have said spent nuclear fuel has been managed at Idaho by DOE and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program since the 1950s.
