The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied a petition to hear a challenge brought by New Mexico-based Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety over a Clean Water Act permit at the Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The high court’s denial of certiorari, or “cert” in legal shorthand, means a decision last April by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit is the final word on the matter. The appeals court held the Concerned Citizens lacked standing to challenge the permit.
The issue, according to the citizen group’s November petition, surrounds whether the lab’s Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility was improperly exempted from needing a permit under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA).
The citizens group argues the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Water Act by issuing a 2014 discharge permit for the treatment facility to DOE and its contractor, now Triad National Security.
Concerns Citizens also complained that the 2014 permit exempted the facility from RCRA and said Triad and DOE are violating federal law by operating the facility.
DOE and Triad have no plans for liquid discharges from the Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility given the installation of evaporators in 2010. The DOE contractor did say that discharges could be needed if the evaporators malfunction or if a change in mission requires more effluent than the evaporators can handle.
Still, Concerned Citizens seized on the evaporators to argue in its brief that a Clean Water Act permit “cannot lawfully be issued for a non-discharging facility.” If the facility is not discharging, its discharge permit should be terminated, the citizen group said.
In its January reply brief, Battelle-led Triad National Security said Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety failed to challenge the 2014 Clean Water Act discharge permit and now, only weeks before a successor permit is due out, is pursuing a long-shot strategy of trying to kill the current permit.
The appeals court said without hard evidence that the Los Alamos facility is releasing contamination into the Rio Grande River, Concerned Citizens cannot prove it has suffered tangible injury, and lacks standing to bring the challenge.
Typically, getting a case heard by the Supreme Court has a slim chance of success. There were 5,910 cert petitions filed with the high court in 2010 and a hearing was granted in only 165 cases. That is a success rate of only 2.8%, or roughly half the success rate of applications to Harvard, according to the Supreme Court Press.
