Supreme Court wrestles with nation’s frustrating search for nuclear waste storage
Associated PressWASHINGTON — 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. “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. 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. Alito, who said the interim sites could remove the incentive to find a permanent solution, asked Brad Fagg, a lawyer for Interim Storage Partners, for a prediction of when a permanent site would open.
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