A federal judge this week gave New Mexico’s attorney general another seven days to fine-tune his next argument in a lawsuit challenging a proposed consolidated interim storage facility in neighboring Texas, court filings show.
June 16 is now the deadline for state attorney general Hector Balderas to make his next move in New Mexico’s ongoing challenge to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s September decision to license Interim Storage Partners’ (ISP) proposed interim storage site in Andrews County, Texas, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals said in an order dated Tuesday.
Balderas was previously scheduled to file his next brief on June 9.
New Mexico has been locked in a legal battle with NRC over ISP’s project since November. It’s the Land of Enchantment’s second attempt at blocking one of two such commercial interim storage sites in the southwest U.S. — the U.S. District Court for New Mexico in March dismissed a similar case against Holtec International’s site planned for Eddy County, N.M.
Balderas is preparing his next volley after the NRC in May argued that the state’s top lawyer lacked the authority to challenge the agency’s licensing decision across state lines. Even if it had such authority, the agency said, Balderas did not establish New Mexico’s standing to sue over the proposed interim storage site.
NRC also argued, as it has in other pending suits against commercial interim storage sites, that Santa Fe hadn’t exhausted all of its agency-level options for fighting the project before taking it to the courts.
Meanwhile, Balderas told the Tenth Circuit in March that NRC had taken a “risky and unauthorized approach” to interim storage by licensing ISP’s proposed site. The decision ran afoul of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the Atomic Energy Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, the state attorney general argued.
As of Friday, the Tenth Circuit had yet to issue any ruling on the case.
