The State of New York wants a federal court to affirm and recognize the state’s claim that it can regulate discharge of irradiated wastewater into the Hudson River.
Attorneys for the Empire State made the request last week in a response to a lawsuit filed in April by Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., which is decommissioning the three-reactor Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanen, N.Y., some 50 miles upriver from downtown Manhattan.
Holtec argues that the federal government alone has the ability to regulate the discharges the company wants to make into the Hudson but attorneys for Albany said that New York, or any other state, can regulate such discharges “to protect the economic interests of the State’s residents.”
That, the state argued in court papers, is what it did in 2023, when it passed a law that uses the threat of escalating fines to prohibit Holtec from dumping irradiated wastewater from plant decommissioning into the Hudson.
Because the state law does not regulate nuclear safety, New York argued, it does not run afoul of the federal Atomic Energy Act.
“During decommissioning, a state’s economic interests outweigh the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s] interests in nuclear safety, and state laws furthering a state’s economic interests are not preempted,” the state wrote in its May 23 response to the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.