ORAL ARGUMENTS SET FOR MAY IN YUCCA CASE

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. has scheduled oral arguments to begin May 2 in the lawsuit challenging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s shut-down of the Yucca Mountain licensing process. The lawsuit against the NRC was filed by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and Nye County, Nev., home to the Yucca Mountain site, the states of South Carolina and Washington and Aiken County, S.C. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the NRC to release its findings on the repository within three years of the application’s submission, a deadline that passed earlier this year. However, the agency closed out its review of the Department of Energy’s Yucca Mountain license application this fall before releasing any regulatory conclusions, citing budgetary concerns. Petitioners argue that “it is unreasonable for the NRC to spend available money to shut down a project the law requires it to complete, and then claim that it may stop complying with the law because it might not get enough money from Congress to pursue the project in the future.”