Beyond Nuclear appealing en banc at D.C. Circuit Court against Holtec’s CISF license

[Tee shirt design by Noel Marquez, co-founder of Alliance for Environmental Strategies (AFES). The design incorporates the shape of the state of New Mexico, its turquoise and gold colors, as well as the Zia Pueblo sun symbol, which also appears on the state flag.]

On July 16, 2025 — the 80th annual commemoration of the Trinity plutonium bomb “test” blast in New Mexico, the world’s first atomic bomb detonation, during the Manhattan Project — Beyond Nuclear’s co-counsel, Diane Curran of Harmon Curran in Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, submitted a MOTION TO GOVERN to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

All other parties to the case have joined Beyond Nuclear in the MOTION.

The MOTION moves that the court lift the hold on abeyance for Beyond Nuclear versus NRC, regarding the agency’s license for Holtec International’s highly radioactive waste consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) in southeastern New Mexico, located midway between Hobbs and Carlsbad, now that the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) has ruled, on June 18, 2025, on Texas v. NRC, regarding the “materially identical” Interim Storage Partners CISF in Texas.

SCOTUS ruled that ISP CISF opponents — the State of Texas, as well as Fasken Land and Minerals — were not “parties aggrieved,” so lacked legal standing.

But the SCOTUS road map, contained in its ruling, indicated that Beyond Nuclear has “raised the right issues in the right court,” for the past many years.

The JOINT MOTION TO GOVERN states:

On June 18, 2025, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Texas, 145 S. Ct. 1762, reversing the judgment of the Fifth Circuit. The Court did not rule on, nor was it presented with, the Nuclear Waste Policy Act question regarding spent fuel ownership identified by Beyond Nuclear in its Petition for Review; nor did the Court resolve the issue of whether Congress has authorized the NRC to license away-from-reactor spent fuel storage facilities. Instead, the Court based its decision on a determination that neither petitioner before the Fifth Circuit was a “party aggrieved” within the meaning of 28 U.S.C § 2344. Id. at 1776-77.

The parties agree that the issue that Beyond Nuclear raised in its Petition for Review, and for which it seeks en banc review, is not moot and is ripe for the Court’s consideration. As a consequence, the parties propose that the Court remove the case from abeyance status and proceed to the consider the petition for en banc review.

Beyond Nuclear and its allies have resisted both these CISFs since 2016, when we sent a letter to NRC, protesting the CISFs as illegal on their face. We have taken part in the NRC licensing proceedings, including environmental reviews, ever since. But we were rebuffed at every turn by NRC. So we then appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court many long years ago, opposing both CISFs, but have been ruled against consistently since. However, we are continuing to press our case, which we are confident is meritorious.

See Beyond Nuclear’s CENTRALIZED STORAGE website section for more information.