Court rejects our appeals against Holtec CISF

[Tee shirt design by Noel Marquez, co-founder of Alliance for Environmental Strategies.]

On August 5, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Beyond Nuclear’s appeal for a rehearing, either en banc (before all the judges of the circuit court), or by the initial three-judge panel which ruled against us previously, in Beyond Nuclear versus U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, regarding Holtec’s consolidated interim storage facility for highly radioactive waste in southeastern New Mexico.

We asked the court to remove from its hold in abeyance our appeal filed last year, after the initial three-judge panel’s ruling. We did so with the support of the other parties to the appeal. And we did so following the Supreme Court of the United States’s (SCOTUS) ruling on June 18, 2025, which laid out a road map indicating we should do so, to further pursue justice in light of violations of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1983, as Amended (NWPA), as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.

Beyond Nuclear, and environmental allies, have opposed Holtec’s CISF in NM, and Interim Storage Partners’ CISF in Texas, from the get-go. We wrote to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2016, urging the agency to cease and desist, as the CISF license applications violated the NWPA on their face. From 2017 on, we took part in every stage of NRC’s environmental and safety reviews re: the proposed CISFs. And many long years ago, we commenced federal appeals at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has included consideration before SCOTUS, as well.

In fact, Beyond Nuclear opposed CISFs long before that, such as before the Obama administration’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, beginning in 2010, and even at our founding in 2007, against the Private Fuel Storage, LLC CISF (they were called Monitored Retrievable Storage sites, or Away-From-Reactor Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations, back then) targeting the tiny Skull Valley Goshutes Reservation in western Utah.

Beyond Nuclear will confer with our legal counsel on this case, Diane Curran of Harmon Curran in Washington, DC, and Mindy Goldstein, director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic at Emory University in Atlanta, to consider our options.

Very hard-won state laws in Texas and New Mexico, opposing the dumps, remain roadblocks against the unprecedented numbers of Mobile Chornobyls that would ship by road, rail, and/or waterway, bound for the Permian Basin of the Southwest, if these dumps were to open.