The state of Texas wants more time to develop its legal argument against a proposed interim storage facility within its borders, according to a new court filing.
Texas would have until Feb. 7 of next year, nearly five months from the day it sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals over a recently licensed site in Andrews County, to file its first brief laying out the state’s case against the commission’s decision.
The court had not ruled on the unopposed motion as of Wednesday morning. As things stood before the filing, Paxton’s team had to lay out its case by Dec. 29.
NRC licensed Interim Storage Partners (ISP) proposal facility Sept. 14. A joint venture between Dallas-based Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and Orano USA, the company wants to build its spent fuel storage site at WCS’s existing low-level waste storage facility in Andrews.
A deadline extension would be good news for Texas, which has yet to roll out a detailed case against the proposed ISP site. In a November filing, Paxton’s team said it would argue that NRC overstepped its authority by licensing a de facto permanent spent fuel repository in Texas, but didn’t provide any additional details.
Meanwhile, the Fifth Circuit has decided that the first motion it will hear in the suit is NRC’s motion to dismiss Texas’s case altogether. The commission says the state didn’t exhaust all of its agency-level options for opposing the proposed site before suing the commission.
