An Idaho county this week urged a federal judge to reject the federal governent’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit against the Department of Energy over ongoing use of the Idaho National Laboratory as a repository for spent nuclear fuel.
Butte County, which says DOE should shoulder more of the social and economic impact of decades of spent fuel storage at the lab, filed its latest brief Monday.
Two days later Department of Justice attorneys asked to extend the government’s reply deadline until July 7, rather than June 26. Attorneys for Justice, DOE, and the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program have pre-scheduled days off at various points between June 19 and July 4.
U.S. District Judge David Nye had not ruled on the extension request as of Thursday.
The county says DOE should halt ongoing rail shipments of the U.S. Navy’s spent fuel to Idaho National Laboratory (INL) until the agency formally analyzes the local impacts of the spent fuel storage.
Until the study is done, there should be no more license extensions for the spent fuel pad for Three-Mile-Island Unit 2 — the reactor that suffered the famous partial meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979, Butte County said.
The county, which sued Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in the U.S. District Court for Idaho in March, has pushed back hard against the Department of Justice’s motion to dismiss last month.
The Justice Department said that federal courts have already rejected Butte County’s case for impact payments. Justice also said the statute of limitations on Idaho’s claims has expired.
Butte County responded that while its lawsuit addresses some issues that occurred more than six years ago, the current case centers around “misconduct and corresponding harm to plaintiff which are occurring at this moment.”
On the issue of impact payments, Butte County “is not claiming that the secretary [of energy] should be compelled by this court to pay a specified sum for an impact assistance payment to Butte County.” But DOE has failed to perform a nondiscretionary annual duty to “assess the degree of these impacts” from spent fuel storage on the community, the county said in the 36-page filing.
In its initial complaint, the county cited DOE’s consent-based siting program and said the agency is considering payments to localities merely willing to discuss being a host spent fuel site.
