The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday denied two groups’ petitions for dismissal of license applications for interim spent fuel storage facilities in Texas and New Mexico.
“The NRC’s regulations allow interested persons to file petitions to intervene and requests for hearing in which they can raise concerns regarding a particular license application. These regulations do not, however, provide for the filing of threshold ‘motions to dismiss’ a license application; instead, interested persons must file petitions to intervene and be granted a hearing,” Annette Vietti-Cook, secretary to the commission, wrote in her order.
The nongovernmental group Beyond Nuclear in September called on the NRC to automatically reject the applications from Holtec International for its project in southeastern New Mexico and from an Orano-Waste Control Specialists partnership for a project in West Texas. On the same day, the regional oil and gas concerns Fasken Land and Minerals Ltd. and Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners made a similar request.
The groups emphasized the potential risk in shipping tens of thousands of tons of radioactive waste to the sites, then storing it for decades. However, their primary legal argument was that the facilities will make the Department of Energy responsible for transport and storage of the spent fuel, but that the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act allows that only when a permanent repository is ready.
There is no such facility — the interim sites are seen as a means for DOE to meet its legal mandate to remove the used fuel from nuclear power reactors until it builds the disposal facility.
Vietti-Cook emphasized that her ruling was strictly procedural, not addressing the legal case raised by the challengers to spent fuel storage.
Beyond Nuclear had separately requested hearings in the separate license proceedings. Vietti-Cook referred its request on the Holtec application, plus those from other groups, for consideration by a board of the NRC’s Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel. A corresponding decision on contentions to the Orano-Waste Control Specialists application would be made following the extended filing deadline of Nov. 12.
