MIDLAND, Texas — There have been recent legal developments for high-level nuclear waste storage in the Permian Basin as one lawsuit is now headed to the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, folks with Fasken Oil and Ranch, who have been behind the efforts to keep it out of the region, shared what the fight is all about.
“Putting the most dangerous material on Earth right above our most precious natural resource is just a bad idea," said Brock McNeel, assistant director of marketing and social media at Fasken Oil and Ranch.
Conversations about a years-long fight continue in order to keep high-level nuclear waste out of the Permian Basin.
“We’re not saying that nuclear waste as a whole is bad, that disposal is bad or even interim storage is bad," McNeel said. "Here it is just not the right fit because we have too much at stake under the ground and above ground in terms of the infrastructure of the Permian Basin – we can’t risk our energy security.”
McNeel said transportation from across the country would be one of the biggest threats.
“In their own report, they estimated for the Holtec site, there would be 13 rail disasters by getting the waste simply from where it is now to the site itself," McNeel said. "That’s 13 opportunities for radioactive casts to break open and destroy a community, destroy a ranch, destroy property or destroy our oil and gas sector, and that’s a really dangerous thing. And so, the storage is one thing but the transportation is the immediate danger.”
Waste Control Specialists in Andrews is appealing a lawsuit against Fasken as WCS aims to store spent nuclear fuel.
NewsWest 9 reached out to WCS when they filed for the appeal on June 12 but did not hear back about their decision to do so.
The case now goes to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We don’t know if the Supreme Court is going to take this case yet – it could go either way. They’ve already decided a lot of Major Questions Doctrine cases in the past two-to-three years and this falls under that purview," McNeel said. "So, we have confidence that this may not even make it to the court but if it does – given the court’s history – we have no doubt really that we can maintain our record, can present our case in the right way and stand a really good chance of keeping spent nuclear fuel out of the Basin via the courts.”
With confidence in keeping spent nuclear fuel out, Fasken’s focus mostly shifts to greater-than-class-c, or GTCC, nuclear waste in their efforts to protect the Basin.
“Right now the fight is going to be GTCC, but luckily we have a winning playbook," McNeel said. "We have been able to defeat spent nuclear fuel which is arguably much harder to defeat than GTCC, so we know what we’re doing. It make take more time, we’re going to need the continued support of the community and the people around it, but I have no doubt that we can get there in the end. But, yes, that’s the next frontier of our fight in this battle.”