Supreme Court steps into debate over where to store nuclear waste
By Melissa Quinn
Updated on: March 5, 2025 / 12:41 PM EST / CBS News
Washington — The Supreme Court on Wednesday jumped into the decades-long dispute over what to do with thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste, as it considered a plan to store it above one of the world's most productive oil fields, the Permian Basin in Texas.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the company Interim Storage Partners are facing off against the state of Texas and Fasken Land and Minerals Ltd., which owns land in the Permian Basin, in the fight over what to do with the spent fuel generated at nuclear reactor sites. The waste can remain radioactive and pose health risks for thousands of years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
How to address the problem of nuclear waste has been complicated by politics since the advent of nuclear power last century. In 1982, Congress enacted a federal law that required the government to establish a permanent facility to house spent fuel, later determined to be Yucca Mountain in Nevada. But the site has yet to be established amid pushback from the state, and funding from Congress dried up years ago. The project was halted during the Obama administration.
The issue of where to store the growing amount of spent fuel remains. Roughly 91,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from commercial power plants are currently in private storage, both at or away from nuclear reactor sites, according to the U.S. government. And with nearly 20% of the nation's electricity supplied by nuclear energy, plants are generating an additional 2,000 metric tons of spent fuel each year, the Energy Department estimates.
The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case in October and is considering two issues. The first is whether Texas and the landowners could challenge the commission's decision to issue the license to Interim Storage Partners. The second is whether federal law allows the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license private companies to temporarily house spent fuel away from nuclear-reactor sites.
