D.C. Circuit Blesses Holtec’s Environmental Injustice

[Image: Tee shirt design by Noel Marquez, co-founder of Alliance for Environmental Strategies in southeastern New Mexico.]

On August 27, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, dubbed the “second highest court in the land,” just below the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled against Beyond Nuclear, a grassroots environmental coalition, and Fasken Land and Minerals/Permian Basin Land and Royalty Owners, rejecting their legal challenges opposing Holtec International’s high-level radioactive waste consolidated interim storage facility. The CISF is targeted at southeastern New Mexico, a Latinx region of the majority minority state (that is, the Latinx and Indigenous population is the majority in the Land of Enchantment).

See the D.C. Circuit three-judge panel’s Judgment, and Opinion.

Beyond Nuclear and allies have resisted Holtec’s scheme since it was unveiled on Nuclear Fool’s Day — April 1, 2017. Actually, we have resisted it far longer than that — including an October 2016 shot across the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s bow, and deep, good faith engagement in the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC) public comment proceedings (2010-2012). Our public comments before the BRC were ignored, as pearls cast before swine.

Legal counsel Diane Curran of Washington, D.C., and Mindy Goldstein of Atlanta, GA, have represented Beyond Nuclear since the get-go.

Beyond Nuclear and allies have also resisted previous CISF schemes, such as those targeting the Skull Valley Goshutes Indian Reservation in Utah, and the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico (not far from Holtec’s currently targeted site), radioactive racism that dates back to the 1980s.

In 2023-2024, the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, headquartered in New Orleans, vacated NRC’s approval of licenses for the supposedly “private” CISFs of Holtec in New Mexico, and Interim Storage Partners in Texas. NRC, DOJ, and the dump companies have appealed these rulings to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

If SCOTUS denies cert., the 5th Circuit’s rulings stand.

If SCOTUS grants cert., it will hear the nuke industry’s appeals.

Even if our side prevails in court, we will have to defend our legal victory against Holtec, ISP, and industry’s lobbying juggernaut on Capitol Hill. Congress could simply change the law, pulling the rug of our court victory out from under us.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) continues to push the CISF concept, albeit in explicitly federal form, under its insincere, environmentally unjust, “concept-based siting” initiative. This includes DOE’s current efforts to downplay high-level radioactive waste transport risks, a rehash of its propaganda campaigns dating back many decades.