In a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court last week, justices sided with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to approve the temporary storage of nuclear waste in Texas and New Mexico.
In a 6-3 ruling, SCOTUS reversed an appeals court decision that had blocked the commission's license to store the waste in Andrews County out in West Texas. The state had filed suit to stop the proposed storage site.
The area is already home to a low-level radioactive site.
Benjamin Weiss, who covers Congress for Courthouse News Service, joined the Texas Standard to discuss the implications of the ruling. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: So tell us about the case. What was the issue for the court to decide?
Benjamin Weiss: So the central thrust of the case was that Texas and this oil and gas holding company known as Fasken Land and Minerals wanted the high court to reverse the NRC's decision to license this facility, this Interim Storage Partners facility.
The central thesis of the majority decision in the case agreed with the commission, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, that Texas and Fasken didn't qualify for a judicial review in the first place because they did not adequately, in the court's view, participate in these agency-level licensing proceedings.
So how can this decision impact other potential nuclear waste sites like Yucca Mountain in Nevada?
Well, actually, I think that this is sort of an interesting takeaway from the case, which is that the court threw out Texas and Fasken's arguments on what's ultimately procedural grounds.
Texas and Fasken had sued under this law known as the Hobbs Act, which is not to be confused with a interstate extortion law of the same name. This Hobbs Act is administrative law, which basically says that any agency action parties that are, quote unquote, "aggrieved by the decision" have 60 days to sue the federal government to get that decision reversed.
So, Texas and Fasken had argued, 'well, we are aggrieved by the decisions to license the ISP site, so we need the entire license reversed.' The court only ruled that Texas and Fasken didn't meet this party-aggrieved standard in the Hobbs Act, and they actually refused to rule on whether or not this ISP site was licensed unlawfully.
In terms of what the upshot is for future nuclear waste facilities or Yucca Mountain, the answer is still sort of unclear because the court did not weigh in on the legality of the federal government licensing away from reactor storage sites of the type that ISP is.
And I know the Andrews County facility in particular is set to store nuclear waste temporarily. Do you know if there's a plan for permanent storage?
Currently, there is not. This has sort of been the white whale of the nuclear industry and of the federal government as they try to find a solution for where to store this around 100,000 tons of nuclear waste that's stored at these reactor sites across the country.
Yucca Mountain is the only government-designated site so far and it's pretty much a hole in the ground and it has been for 40 years because of political opposition from Nevada. The ISP site and there's a sister site – or I guess I suppose you'd call it cousin site – that was proposed for southeastern New Mexico by Holtec International, which is another Nuclear Services Company are supposed to store it this nuclear waste. The ISP site would store about half of the nation's stockpile and the Holtec site, more or less, the other half for a period of 40 years.
Of course, opponents are concerned that those sites will become de facto permanent sites in the absence of an actual federal permanent repository. The Department of Energy has been working for a few years on a project to site a potential federally operated interim storage site.
So another temporary storage facility while the government works on a final storage solution. But so far, there has been very little movement on that effort as well.
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