The Prairie Island Indian Community has filed an appeal in a federal court against the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ‘Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule’ for failing to address the environmental concerns of long-term storage, the tribe announced this week. Although filed separately, their appeal follows a similar one filed this week in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by a coalition of states from the Northeast, led by New York. “We had hoped that the NRC’s revised rule and environmental impact analysis would remedy he deficiencies identified by the Court of Appeals and reflect an honest, realistic assessment of how indefinite onsite storage might affect future generations,” Tribal Council President Ronald Johnson said in a statement. “Unfortunately the NRC’s Continued Storage Rule simply provides regulatory cover for the federal government’s ongoing breach of its statutory obligation under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA) to remove spent nuclear waste to a geologic repository.”
The Prairie Island Tribe also was part of the group that successfully argued the NRC needed to redo its Waste Confidence rulemaking. 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.
