A federal district court decision on Monday overturned decisions by the
US Department of Interior that had blocked construction of a commercial spent
fuel storage facility in Utah and remanded Private Fuel Storage's right-of-way
application and lease of tribal land to Interior for further consideration.
Following a series of delays in the US Department of Energy's repository
project at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, in the mid-1990s, PFS, a nuclear utility
consortium, said it would build an away-from-reactor spent fuel storage
facility that would allow its members to move up to 40,000 metric tons of
spent reactor fuel from their reactors.
Though PFS obtained a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to
build and operate the spent fuel storage facility, Interior's Bureau of Land
Management denied the consortium's request for a right of way across tribal
land owned by the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians, saying there were too
many unanswered questions about the project.
Interior also denied approval of the PFS-Goshute long-term lease of
Goshute tribal land on which the facility would be built. The court remanded both of PFS' applications to Interior for
reconsideration.
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