By Kevin Kamps

On January 12 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition [denied a “writ of certiorari”] in Beyond Nuclear vs. NRC, in which a coalition of advocacy groups and private firms urged the court to review erroneous lower court rulings which had unlawfully upheld the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) approval of Holtec International’s license to build and operate a high-level radioactive waste dump in New Mexico. If eventually permitted, the Holtec dump — a so-called “consolidated interim storage facility” or CISF — could store up to 173,600 metric tonnes of highly radioactive waste fuel from commercial nuclear power reactors, and would be the largest such nuclear waste dump on Earth.

The Supreme Court’s denial ends the coalition’s decade-long legal challenge, which labored through years of NRC licensing proceedings and federal appeals court proceedings. At the very same time, the coalition legally challenged Interim Storage Partners, LLC’s plan for a CISF in western Texas (with another 40,000 metric tons of radioactive waste fuel rods), 40 miles east of Holtec’s dump site in New Mexico. Although resistance to both dumps is ongoing, the legal challenges are over — for now.

While the appeals did not prevail in reversing the NRC’s unlawful approval of the two CISF licenses, they helped buy time and demonstrated the widespread, nation-wide opposition that was crucial for the hard-won passage of state laws — in both New Mexico and Texas — which have effectively banned both dumps. Great credit is due to the steadfast attorneys that kept this case alive for ten years: Diane Curran, of Harmon Curran in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein, the Director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

A major aim of the coalition’s opposition has been putting the brakes on industry and government plans for large-scale, nation-wide shipments of the high-level waste on highways, railroads, and even waterways through most of the lower 48 states — all bound for the dumps in New Mexico (Holtec), and Texas (Interim Storage Partners).

Intended shipments include scary barge and boat shipments of highly radioactive waste intended to sail the waters of the Great Lakes. Such barge shipments on Lake Michigan were originally proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under its Yucca Mountain Project in 2002. Holtec later embraced the Palisades-to-Muskegon barge transport plans in its 2020 “Palisades Post-Shutdown Decommissioning Actvities Report.”
Wisconsin reactor operators — at Point Beach 1 and 2, and at the shutdown Kewaunee unit — very likely also plan to ship their highly radioactive wastes on Lake Michigan into Milwaukee using barges.

The risk of a container of highly radioactive waste sinking to the bottom of the Great Lakes represents an existential threat to 21% of the world’s surface fresh water, drinking water supply for over 40 million people in eight U.S. states, two Canadian provinces, and a very large number of Indigenous Nations.

And yet the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Lab, at least since December 2015, has been working to expand barge options beyond the Great Lakes. [Nukewatch calls these ideas “the Edmund Fitzgerald meets the Exxon Valdez.”]

— Kevin Kamps is Executive Director of Don’t Waste Michigan.