New York, along with Connecticut and Vermont, will challenge the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ‘Continued Storage of Spent Nuclear Fuel Rule’ by petitioning a federal court to invalidate the rule for failing to properly address the National Environmental Policy Act and other court concerns, New York’s Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced yesterday. New York led the charge against the NRC’s former Waste Confidence rulemaking that resulted in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit invalidating the NRC’s findings, forcing the NRC to take a harder look at environmental effects of continued storage of spent nuclear fuel. “In 2012, we won a landmark federal court ruling requiring NRC to perform a full and detailed assessment of the risks involved in the long-term, on-site storage of highly radioactive nuclear wastes at nuclear power plants,” Attorney General Schneiderman said in a statement. “However, in responding to that ruling, the NRC has turned its responsibilities on their head — focusing on issues that are unrelated to the risks posed to the environment, public health, and safety. The NRC’s approach is wrong and illegal, and I will continue to fight to ensure that our communities receive the full and detailed accounting of the risks of long-term, on-site nuclear waste storage that they deserve.”
The NRC, for its part, determined in its response rulemaking that spent fuel could be safely stored on site well past a reactor’s lifespan. When the NRC first issued a revised waste confidence rule in 2010, the Commission extended the length of time assumed to be safe for storage of spent fuel at a reactor site from 30 to 60 years. In its new update, the NRC based its rule on a generic environmental impact statement that found the environmental impact of storing spent fuel on-site was small in most categories, including an indefinite timeframe. This final rulemaking, though, removed language concerning a timeline for the availability of a repository after the Commission determined that was a policy decision outside the NRC’s regulation jurisdiction. In regards to the legal challenge, NRC will respond in due time. “We’re reviewing it and will respond according to the court’s schedule,” NRC spokesman David McIntyre said.
