Supreme Court wades into decades-old impasse over how to store nuclear waste

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in a decades-old fight that tends to put Americans on edge even more than politics: Where to store the nation’s spent nuclear fuel.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in a decades-old fight that tends to put Americans on edge even more than politics: where to store the nation’s spent nuclear fuel. The case involves important questions about the power of independent agencies to make decisions at a moment when President Donald Trump is seeking to capture greater control of their work. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, and several private parties are fighting a decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license a company that intends to store as much as 40,000 metric tons of nuclear waste on the Permian Basin in the western part of the state. Two questions are at issue in the case, NRC v. Texas. The first is whether Texas and the private plaintiffs may seek intervention from federal courts. The second is whether the federal agency has the power to license such facilities away from reactor sites where the waste was generated. “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission purports to allow a private entity to store thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel above Texas’s Permian Basin – the world’s most productive oil field and the only source of safe water for hundreds of miles,” Texas told the Supreme Court in a brief. America’s nuclear waste is sealed away in coffin-like casks and spread out among more than 50 locations around the country. While other countries have developed plans to create a permanent home for spent fuel, the US has not. The decades-old idea to bury the material at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain has long been dead.