Supreme Court wrestles with nation’s frustrating search for nuclear waste storage
By MARK SHERMAN
March 5, 2025
WASHINGTON The Supreme Court on Wednesday wrestled with whether to restart plans to temporarily store nuclear waste at sites in rural Texas and New Mexico even as some justices worried about safety issues and the lack of progress toward a permanent solution.
The justices heard arguments in a case that reflects the complicated politics of the nation’s so far futile quest for a permanent underground storage facility. A plan to build a national storage facility northwest of Las Vegas at Yucca Mountain has been mothballed because of staunch opposition from most Nevada residents and officials.
The court took up a challenge by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and a private company with a license for the Texas facility to an appellate ruling that found the commission had no authority to grant the license. The outcome of the case will affect plans for a similar facility in New Mexico roughly 40 miles away.
The licenses would allow the companies to operate the facilities for 40 years, with the possibility of a 40-year renewal.
“That doesn’t sound very interim to me,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said, while also questioning the advisability of storing spent nuclear fuel “on a concrete platform in the Permian Basis, where we get all our oil and gas from.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined Gorsuch in asking questions suggesting they were the most likely to uphold the ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Roughly 100,000 tons of spent fuel, some of it dating from the 1980s, is piling up at current and former nuclear plant sites nationwide and growing by more than 2,000 tons a year. The waste was meant to be kept there temporarily before being deposited deep underground.
The NRC has said that the temporary storage sites are needed because existing nuclear plants are running out of room. The presence of the spent fuel also complicates plans to decommission some plants, the Justice Department said in court papers.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, looking ahead to the United States’ 250th anniversary next year, said, “I hope that we make it another 250, but if it takes 40 or 80 years for a solution to come, it would still be temporary, correct?”
Justice Department lawyer Malcolm Stewart agreed, noting that the spent fuel has to be kept somewhere, whether at operating and decommissioned plants or elsewhere.
Security also is cheaper with the waste in one or two locations, Stewart said, relying on arguments made by Interim Storage Partners LLC, the company with the Texas license.
