Two state lawsuits challenging a proposed interim storage facility in Texas won’t see much more action until after New Year’s, according to court documents filed in both cases this week.
New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas has until Jan. 18 to file the next brief in his lawsuit against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) planned site in Andrews, Texas, according to a Tuesday order from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Balderas, who filed suit against NRC in November, has taken aim at the agency’s environmental review of the ISP site, arguing that the survey “satisfied neither statutory nor regulatory requirements.”
Meanwhile, Texas this week asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Monday for more time to develop its legal argument against the proposed ISP site. If approved, state attorney general Ken Paxton would have until Feb. 7 of next year, nearly five months from the day it sued NRC, to file its first brief laying out the state’s case against the commission’s decision.
The court had not ruled on Paxton’s unopposed motion as of Friday morning. As things stood before the filing, Paxton’s team had to lay out its case by Dec. 29.
ISP, a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Orano USA, plans to build its interim storage site at WCS’s existing waste facility in Andrews County, Texas, near the border with New Mexico. NRC licensed the proposed site in September.
A deadline extension would be good news for Texas, which has yet to formally present its legal argument for suing NRC. In a November filing, Paxton’s team said it would argue that NRC overstepped its authority by licensing a de facto permanent spent fuel repository in Texas, but didn’t provide any additional details.
NRC asked both courts to dismiss the states’ cases, arguing that neither exhausted all of its agency-level options for opposing the proposed site before suing the commission. The Fifth Circuit has said it would proceed with NRC’s motion to dismiss Texas’ suit, but the Tenth Circuit had yet to rule on a similar motion by deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
NRC is facing a wide range of legal challenges to both the proposed ISP site and a separate interim storage facility proposed by Holtec International in Eddy County, N.M. The Land of Enchantment filed suit against the agency over the Holtec site in March — the commission has moved to dismiss that case as well. The volley of lawsuits has been keeping NRC and Department of Justice lawyers busy, commission chairman Christopher Hanson told RadWaste Monitor in an interview last week.
