The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in March about the constitutionality of commercial interim storage of spent nuclear fuel, according to the court’s docket.
Arguments were scheduled for March 5 in a consolidated case that will also give the high court a chance to consider the constitutionality of methods the state of Texas used to effectively outlaw the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of commercial interim storage.
The NRC and parties supporting it have until Dec. 2 to file their final briefs in the case. Texas and its supporters have until Jan. 15 to respond. The Supreme Court, an independent branch of the federal government, ticketed the case for oral arguments in October.
The case originated in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2023, as part of a lawsuit Texas filed two years earlier, ruled that NRC was not legally allowed to license the commercial interim storage of spent nuclear fuel.
NRC staked its case on the argument that the Atomic Energy Act allows the agency to license three isotopes that are found in all spent nuclear fuel. The commission also told the Fifth Circuit that Texas should not have been allowed to sue in an appeals court because the state did not participate in NRC’s licensing process and therefore had no grievance to appeal.
Texas sued the NRC in the circuit court after the agency licensed Interim Storage Partners, a joint venture of Waste Control Specialists (WCS) of Andrews, Texas, and Orano USA, to store spent fuel from U.S. power plants at at a planned facility near WCS’ existing low-level radioactive waste disposal site.
Interim Storage Partners’ proposed site was licensed to store around 40,000 tons of spent fuel, nearly half of the roughly 90,000 tons of spent fuel now stored at or near the plants that created it, for up to 40 years. The company would have been allowed to apply for license extensions.
When the Fifth Circuit struck down the Interim Storage Partners’ license, it also killed the only other NRC-licensed commercial interim storage facility, which Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., had proposed to build in Eddy County, N.M. If the high court rules for the NRC and Interim Storage Partners, both licenses could become valid again.
