Two new legal appeals to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ‘Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule,’ formerly known as Waste Confidence, emerged yesterday from a group of nine environmental groups and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The new challenges join the other legal appeals to the Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit this week from a coalition of Northeast states, led by New York, and the Prairie Island Indian Community. The NRDC claims in its appeal that the NRC failed to comply with the court order from 2012 that required the agency to look closer at environmental impacts of continued storage of spent fuel. “The NRC disregarded the explicit direction of the D.C. Circuit to examine the environmental impacts of indefinite storage of spent nuclear fuel in the event there is no repository,” NRDC Senior Attorney Geoffrey Fettus said in a statement. “Instead of complying with the National Environmental Policy Act and assessing those serious environmental impacts and alternatives to limit or avoid them, the NRC created an expedient fiction – that nothing will ever change at storage sites and safe agency practices will persist forever, obviating the need for a repository. This lawsuit simply requests the Court send the agency back to do the job it should have done in the first instance.”
The nine environmental groups, meanwhile, focused on the danger of the NRC continuing licensing decisions amid the risks associated with continued storage. “The NRC has not dealt seriously with the safety and environmental risks posed by extended spent fuel storage and disposal,” the group’s lead attorney Diane Curran said last week. “The rule does not make findings regarding the feasibility of safely disposing of spent fuel, as required under the Atomic Energy Act. And neither the rule nor the environmental impact statement even addresses the question of whether reactors should be licensed given the environmental risks and high costs of spent fuel storage and disposal.”
