Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a motion with the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to have the court force the federal government to re-channel its funds and activities towards a spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage solution at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The motion seeks to stop the Department of Energy from directing funds and spending time working on other long-term solutions to the build up of SNF at nuclear plants around the country, as plant owners and communities wait for a federal solution to the issue. The issue, the motion suggests, has already been resolved with the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982, which authorized the DOE to pursue and finalize plans for a national repository at Yucca Mountain.
“The NWPA requires DOE to begin accepting SNF, and have a place to store it, by January 31, 1998 – over 19 years ago,” the motion claims. “The Act also mandated that the federal government focus all energy on building a repository at Yucca Mountain and prohibits it from considering other sites for permanent repositories.”
“Two decades later, though Congress never changed the deadline, DOE has not accepted an ounce of SNF, much less completed statutorily-mandated licensing proceeding for a repository, or achieved NWPA endgame – either a grant or a denial of a license for the Yucca repository.”
The DOE, instead, violated the NWPA by seeking a “consent-based” alternative to Yucca Mountain, which, has not been found.
“The goal of this latest filing is to have the federal government follow the law and focus its efforts on the permanent nuclear waste facility selected by Congress,” Texas Insider quoted Paxton as saying.
“Every day the federal government refuses to fulfill its mandate under federal law is another day that more nuclear waste piles up above ground, threatening our health and safety, and placing Texas at greater risk …” Paxton said.