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

(CNN) — 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.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licensed the facility, argues that Texas officials shouldn’t have been permitted to file their suit at all because the state didn’t formally object to the plan when the agency first awarded the storage license to Interim Storage Partners.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled the NRC does not have the authority to issue licenses to store nuclear fuel away from reactors. Because of that, the case brings back to the high court a question of agency power in situations where Congress has not granted explicit authority for an action. The conservative court has repeatedly sided against federal agencies in recent years.

America’s massive, 94,000-ton stockpile of spent fuel has already cost taxpayers $47 billion in storage fees, a price tag that will continue to grow until Washington can find a permanent solution.

The Supreme Court will hand down a decision in the case by the end of June.

CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this report.

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