New Mexico’s attorney general moved his fight against commercial interim storage to an appeals court after a District Court threw out his first challenge to the site in early March, according to recent court documents.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has until May 9 to respond to state Attorney General Hector Balderas’s most recent arguments against the agency’s decision to license Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposed spent fuel storage site in Andrews, Texas, according to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals docket.
In a March 10 briefing, Balderas doubled down on his claim that NRC’s September decision to license the proposed ISP site was a “risky and unauthorized approach” to interim storage. He repeated the now well-worn argument that the commission’s approval violated the Nuclear Waste Policy Act as well as its governing law the Atomic Energy Act.
Balderas also contended that NRC ran afoul of the National Environmental Policy Act by, among other things, making “unsupported and unrealistic assumptions” about the future existence of a permanent spent fuel repository.
Balderas’s arguments against the proposed ISP site came around the same time that the U.S. District Court for New Mexico dismissed a similar case filed by the state attorney general in March 2021.
The district court concluded that only the Tenth Circuit had jurisdiction to rule on the legality of the ISP site nor a counterpart facility proposed for New Mexico by Holtec International. A spokesperson for Balderas told Exchange Monitor at the time that the attorney general would “proceed accordingly” based on that decision.
If it gets built, ISP has said that its proposed site could store around 40,000 tons of spent fuel. There are currently roughly 80,000 tons of spent fuel stranded at reactor sites across the country.
