Supreme Court takes on dispute over nuclear waste storage sites
Texas claims the Nuclear Regulatory Commission lacks authority to approve plans.
March 5, 2025, 6:07 PM
Like a radioactive hot potato, a solution to America's growing stockpile of nuclear waste keeps getting passed around.
The issue lands before the Supreme Court on Wednesday in a dispute from Texas over the federal government's authority to allow temporary storage of spent nuclear fuel at privately owned facilities far from reactors.
The justices are being asked to reject the arrangement, even though it's far from clear where the highly toxic waste would go.
Congress remains at an impasse over plans first approved more than 40 years ago to hold all of the country's nuclear waste at a single permanent, underground federal facility, which has never been completed.
There are more than 91,000 metric tons of radioactive waste from U.S. commercial nuclear power plants, according to the Energy Department. The waste remains dangerous for thousands of years and must be carefully managed.
Plaintiffs in the high court case, including the state of Texas and a group of landowners, are seeking to block Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval of a private nuclear waste storage facility in the Permian Basin, an area rich with oil deposits and limited sources of safe drinking water near the New Mexico border.
Congress in 1954 gave the commission near exclusive control over the possession and transfer of nuclear material in the U.S., including the ability to issue licenses to private entities to store it in its various forms.
In 1982, lawmakers authorized creation of a federal nuclear waste site, later designated as Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and encouraged interim waste storage by private energy companies at power plants while construction moved forward.
Texas argues that because neither law makes explicit mention of storing nuclear waste at private facilities, far from the reactors where it was generated, the commission lacks the authority to issue a license.
A federal appeals court agreed, blocking construction.
