In a court case over an interim storage facility planned for New Mexico, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission tapped the judge’s shoulder Tuesday to let him know they had licensed a similar site just one state over.
In a Tuesday court filing, NRC alerted the U.S. District Court for New Mexico to a license the agency granted Monday to Interim Storage Partners (ISP) for its proposed interim storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Andrews County, Texas. The agency is currently navigating a lawsuit by New Mexico attorney general Hector Balderas over a similar site proposed for the state by Holtec International.
The agency also told the court in a separate filing Tuesday that it had sent in all of its briefing materials and was ready for judge James Browning to make a decision. NRC has asked the court to dismiss Balderas’s suit, which accused the commission of violating federal law.
In his March lawsuit, Balderas argued that licensing Holtec’s proposed Lea County, N.M. interim storage site would violate the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA). Balderas said the law forbids NRC from licensing an interim site before a permanent spent fuel repository exists. The agency countered that the NWPA only applies to Department of Energy storage sites, and that the Atomic Energy Act gives NRC the authority to license commercial sites like Holtec’s and ISP’s.
At deadline Thursday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing the court hadn’t made any further rulings on the case.
Now that the ISP site is licensed, Holtec’s counterpart is next on NRC’s docket. The agency has said that it would release a final environmental review of the site later this year. A final licensing decision should come down in January.
