nuclear waste

In this article, I present the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision in case No. 21-60743 relating to the rejection of a license to store spent nuclear power plant rods from out of state in a facility in Texas.

It is a long decision as court decisions usually are. It may be a strange way to introduce the enormous topic of the storage of nuclear waste.  There are two main types of nuclear waste:

A. Related to Nuclear Weapons

B. Related to Nuclear Fission Energy Plants (this case is related to this category of nuclear waste but the two topics are very intertwined)

There are other minor categories including medical.

The common characteristic in all categories of nuclear waste is generally no one wants to store it. There are many reasons for that. Some are obvious. By no one, I mean no states. Some communities see the storage of nuclear waste as an economic development opportunity.

I am reporting on this decision mostly because it is recent and addresses the state’s rights aspects of the problem. If you read the decision carefully, you will glean additional information.

I will summarize some of that at the end of the article.

I know that court decisions are boring but this topic is very important. Some of the environmental issues were touched in this decision but the issue of the transport of nuclear waste and the risk this creates was only hinted at.

This is a large problem for the U.S. and many other nations and I have had difficulty addressing it because of all the complications and the large amount of information that is important to understand. In this case, the focus was on legal issues so it was perhaps a good way to introduce the topic. The legal issues are extremely important but the technical issues are also extremely important. I will be getting into those in future articles and I plan to write a number of articles on this topic because of its importance.

At the end of the article, there is an opportunity to submit comments and I encourage readers to do so. It is usually better to submit a comment that way than to me directly because more people will see the comment and responses by me and others to the comment will also be seen by others. So it stimulates discussion. Please feel free to send this article to anyone who you think will benefit from reading it.