The state of New Mexico is expanding its legal campaign against spent fuel storage with a new lawsuit challenging a proposed interim storage facility in Texas, according to a press release this week.
State attorney general Hector Balderas and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) asked a judge in the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals to review the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s decision to license Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposed interim storage site in Andrews, Texas, according to a news release published Monday.
“The NRC has rammed through this approval of a nuclear waste dump just outside of New Mexico’s border in violation of the clear intent of Congress and without due regard to the risks and expenses it would impose on our State,” Balderas said in the release.
In his argument, attached to the press release, Balderas said that NRC’s environmental impact statement (EIS) for the proposed Texas site runs afoul of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The agency’s EIS “has satisfied neither statutory nor regulatory requirements and its record of decision eschews reasonable consideration of environmental impacts” of the proposed site, Balderas argued. At deadline Friday the case had yet to be docketed with the Tenth Circuit.
New Mexico is also locked in a legal battle with NRC over another proposed interim storage site in its own state. A separate suit filed by Balderas over Holtec International’s planned site in Eddy County, N.M. is awaiting judgement in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico, where NRC has asked a judge to dismiss the case.
The states and other stakeholders have looked to federal law in recent months to shoot down the two proposed interim storage sites. Both Texas and New Mexico have argued that NRC would run afoul of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), the government’s guiding beacon for rad waste policy, if it licensed either the Holtec or ISP sites.
The states contend that the NWPA bars the feds from building interim storage until a permanent spent fuel repository exists — and with Yucca Mountain in Nevada on ice for the foreseeable future, none currently does.
Some experts, and NRC itself, disagree with that notion, arguing that the commission is governed under the Atomic Energy Act and not the NWPA — and that, in any case, the NWPA’s provisions on interim storage licenses only apply to federal sites, not commercially owned and operated facilities such as those proposed by ISP and Holtec.
So far, neither argument has been tested in court.
