The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will get a chance early next year to convince a federal judge to drop a lawsuit challenging a proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel planned for New Mexico, according to a new court filing.
The U.S. District Court for New Mexico will hold a hearing Jan. 20 on NRC’s motion to dismiss New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas’s suit over Holtec International’s proposed interim storage site, according to a notice published Tuesday. The hearing will also cover Holtec’s request to intervene in the proceedings.
In its June motion to dismiss the case, NRC argued that the district court didn’t have jurisdiction over Balderas’s challenge to the Holtec licensing proceedings, and that New Mexico didn’t “exhaust its administrative remedies” for opposing the site, such as filing an agency-level complaint.
Balderas argued in his March lawsuit that if the NRC licensed Holtec to build its planned interim storage site in Eddy County, N.M., it would run afoul of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which he said bars the federal government from going ahead with interim storage before a permanent repository is in place.
NRC and some experts have challenged that claim, saying that the NWPA only applies to nuclear waste sites owned by the Department of Energy and not private projects such as Holtec’s.
Meanwhile, the commission pumped the brakes last week on its licensing review of the proposed Holtec site.
In a Friday letter to the Camden, N.J., nuclear services company, NRC again delayed a required safety review and its final licensing decision until Holtec can come up with some more information agency staff needs to wrap things up. NRC had said that it planned to make a final decision on the proposed site in January.
NRC is also fighting to have a separate lawsuit against a recently-licensed interim storage site in Texas thrown out. On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to review the commission’s motion to dismiss state attorney general Ken Paxton’s suit challenging Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposed site in Andrews, Texas.
