A federal judge this week dismissed a lawsuit filed against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by a prominent nuclear trade group over the agency’s interpretation of very-low level waste disposal regulations.
The court lacked jurisdiction to make a ruling, according to a filing Tuesday.
If a 2019 letter to industry from NRC detailing its interpretation of the rule — which says that the federal government alone has final jurisdiction over the disposal of very-low level waste — was a “final order” from the agency, then the court would be able to make a decision, the filing said.
In the case filed November 2019, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) argued that the commission’s letter ran afoul of the Atomic Energy Act and NRC’s own regulations. The agency’s interpretation also created an unfair burden on licensees that have existing very low-level waste agreements with host states, NEI argued.
However, since the commission had previously stated its interpretation in a 2016 Regulatory Issue Summary (RIS) and the 2019 letter introduces nothing new, the court doesn’t have the ability to review it, Judges Patricia Millett, Cornelia Pillard, and Douglas Ginsburg wrote in Tuesday’s per curiam judgement.
Very low-level waste is the informal term for the least radioactive type of Class-A radioactive waste: lowest among the three classes designated by the federal government, and which among other things includes incinerator ash from research sites and contaminated debris from demolition of nuclear facilities.
The nation’s very-low level waste is currently disposed of at four federally-licensed facilities for low-level waste: EnergySolutions’s sites in Utah and South Carolina; US Ecology’s at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state; and Waste Control Specialists’ in Texas.
