The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asked a federal court to throw out industry’s request for judicial review of the commission’s claim that the federal government is the ultimate decision-maker about low-level waste disposal.
In a brief filed last Friday with the D.C. Circuit Court, the commission both refuted the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI) legal basis for review and restated its own position NRC has sole authority to approve its licensees’ alternative methods of low-level radioactive waste disposal.
The NEI has taken NRC to court over low-level waste disposal before, but this latest case, filed in February 2020, focuses narrowly on a 2019 NRC letter to industry, in which the commission refused NEI’s request to rescind federal guidance from 2016 that said all NRC licensees must seek federal permission to pursue alternative disposal methods, even in states that have an agreement with the feds to oversee radioactive waste.
NEI claimed the 2019 letter amounted to a “brand new—and still puzzling—legal theory,” which the court should review. NRC, in Friday’s brief, said the commission’s “theory is neither new nor puzzling,” and in fact is “exactly the same” as what it said in 2016.
The NEI had not responded to NRC’s filing at deadline Wednesday.
