High Court to Weigh Future of Nuclear Waste, Licensing Policy
Nuclear industry wants to preserve licensing, appeal procedures
Texas, other states want to protect land from waste damages
By Alexis Waiss
March 4, 2025, 6:30 PM GMT+8
The US Supreme Court will soon address a decades-long feud about what the nuclear industry should do with its spent fuel while it waits for Congress to establish a permanent repository.
Justices will hear arguments Wednesday surrounding the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s right to license commercialized mass nuclear waste storage and opponents’ standing to challenge those licenses in court.
Interim Storage Partners LLC and Holtec International Corp. attempted to provide a solution by building temporary storage sites in west Texas and southeast New Mexico, but the NRC faced pushback in the Fifth Circuit and Tenth Circuit after it approved 40-year licenses for those facilities.
“It can become difficult in an uncertain regulatory environment to get financing for projects,” said Brad Thompson, an energy partner for Duane Morris LLP based in Austin, Texas. “I do think that there’s going to be a chilling effect on development of new projects if there’s not clarity about what is going to be required.”
The ISP site in Andrews County, Texas, could hold up to 40,000 tons of highly radioactive waste from plants across the country, but Texas says that waste will be stored on top of an oil field with active oil and gas wells. That spent fuel “is too ‘dangerous’ to be placed anywhere other than in ‘a deep geologic repository,’” the state said in its brief, citing statements from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The commission argues the Atomic Energy Act gives them the authority to license temporary private storage away from nuclear reactors and that Texas should not have the ability to sue in the Fifth Circuit since it never participated in administrative proceedings.
But the Texas Attorney General’s Office argues administrative law doesn’t explicitly forbid them from filing a petition for review. The department also claims it has a major questions case, because Congress clearly designated spent nuclear fuel to be stored in Yucca Mountain, Nev., or at an interim federal facility, not a private facility.
