More than 50 nuclear power plants in the United States produce electricity for American homes and businesses. But those plants also generate dangerous spent nuclear fuel, which is usually stored on site. Because some plants are shutting down or no longer operating, on-site storage is not a viable long-term solution. To address the storage problem, federal law has long designated the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada as the future permanent site for disposal of spent nuclear fuel. But the Nevada project has caused significant political controversy and has stalled.
To fill the void, some private businesses have sought to build and operate facilities to store spent nuclear fuel “offsite”—that is, off the site of a nuclear power plant. To do so, however, they need to obtain licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Here, the Commission granted a renewable 40-year license to a private entity seeking to store spent nuclear fuel at an off-site facility in West Texas. The State of Texas and a private West Texas business known as Fasken Land and Minerals objected to the project and sued in the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. They argued that federal law does not authorize storage of spent nuclear fuel at private off-site facilities.
The threshold question here is whether Texas and Fasken may maintain this suit. The Court of Appeals said yes. We disagree. Under the Hobbs Act, only an aggrieved “party” may obtain judicial review of a Commission licensing decision. To qualify as a party to a licensing proceeding, the Atomic Energy Act requires that one either be a license applicant or have successfully intervened in the licensing proceeding. In this case, however, Texas and Fasken are not license applicants, and they did not successfully intervene in the licensing proceeding.
So neither was a party eligible to obtain judicial review in the Fifth Circuit. For that reason, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals and do not decide the underlying statutory dispute over whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission possesses authority to license private off-site storage facilities.
