Fighting to keep its lawsuit over a proposed interim storage site alive, Texas’ attorney general said Tuesday that the Lonestar State deserves its day in federal court because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has effectively licensed a permanent nuclear repository in the state.
Texas Attorney General Bill Paxton “will argue that by licensing a de facto permanent facility for spent nuclear fuel, the agency has exceeded its power,” according to a Tuesday filing with the court.
Although the argument was only a skeleton of the case Paxton must still make in full before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, it was the most the state has revealed about its legal objections to the proposed Interim Storage Partners (ISP) site since filing its lawsuit in late September, not long after the company got its NRC license.
In Tuesday’s filing, Paxton also rebutted points the NRC raised in its Nov. 3 motion to dismiss the case, saying Texas did indeed participate adequately in the licensing process for the proposed interim storage facility, despite the agency’s claim to the contrary.
Both Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s (TCEQ) comments to NRC opposing ISP’s proposed interim storage site are sufficient to make Texas an injured party under the Hobbs Act, Paxton said. NRC claimed that because Texas didn’t request an agency-level hearing on the ISP site’s license, it had no right to sue.
The court on Nov. 3 agreed to put a hold on the suit’s briefing schedule while it evaluates NRC’s motion to dismiss. The court had previously said that Texas would need to make its argument by Dec. 13.
Now, Paxton asked the court to, at minimum, carry NRC’s motion to dismiss while the state “develop[s] its attack on the Commission’s authority to issue the license.” Otherwise, the court should toss the motion outright, the filing said.
ISP, a joint venture between Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Orano USA, is looking to build its proposed site at WCS’ existing low-level waste storage facility in Andrews, Texas. NRC licensed the site in September.
Paxton isn’t the only one fighting interim storage in the region. In Santa Fe to the west, New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas upped his campaign against interim storage over the weekend by filing his own lawsuit against the proposed ISP site in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. Balderas is already locked in another legal battle challenging a similar interim storage site planned for New Mexico by Holtec International.
