The legal challenge to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule, formerly known as Waste Confidence, will not see major action until the fall of 2015, two attorneys involved in the dispute said yesterday during a panel on the rulemaking at the Waste Management Conference. A coalition of states and environmental groups filed a suit earlier this year against the rulemaking in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, alleging that the NRC failed to address the court’s 2010 demands to strengthen its Waste Confidence assertion. “We are still waiting on a briefing schedule from the court, and there may be some additional lawsuits associated with the Commission’s recent decision to reject the petition,” said Jonathan Rund, Assistant General Counsel with the Nuclear Energy Institute, who has joined as an intervener with the NRC. “It’s not exactly clear what the schedule is going to be, but I think as we move forward we will have briefings later this year.” Geoffrey Fettus, lead nuclear attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, also echoed Rund’s timeline: “3rd or 4th Quarter is about when it will take place. The briefing schedule will come from the court, in my guess, sometime in May.”
The NRC determined in its response rulemaking to the court’s order that spent fuel could be safely stored on site well past a reactor’s lifespan. When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In its new update, the NRC based its rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories, including an indefinite timeframe. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was a policy decision outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction. Although the challengers have yet to lay out their formal court argument, it is widely believed to center on an alleged failure on NRC’s part to fully consider all the things needed for a National Environmental Policy Act review, including a thorough alternatives analysis.
