” Fight over West Texas nuclear waste plan to hit U.S. Supreme Court ” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a yearslong dispute over a plan to ship highly radioactive nuclear waste to rural West Texas, a case that could have sweeping implications for how the nation deals with a growing stockpile of waste generated by nuclear power plants.
A company called Interim Storage Partners has long pursued the plan to move “high-level” nuclear waste from power plants across the nation to an existing nuclear waste storage facility in Andrews County, on the Texas-New Mexico border.
Last year, in a Texas-led lawsuit, a federal court blocked the plan and threw out Interim Storage Partners’s federal license to handle the waste. A federal appeals court upheld the decision earlier this year, but the company and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission urged the Supreme Court to reconsider the ruling.