Back to court for Yucca Mountain?

Looks like the lawyers may be heading back to court in the legal fight over the Yucca Mountain Project, or what is left of it.

This week, an attorney for Washington state -- which has millions of gallons of nuclear waste it wants moved -- asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “clarify” its decision to end license hearings for a Nevada repository.

Andrew Fitz said the decision appeared “contradictory,” since the NRC deadlocked in a 2-2 vote on whether the Obama administration could withdraw the project from the NRC docket.  The tie vote means the Yucca application remained before the agency.

Fitz has received a response from the NRC.  Its message in short: If you don’t like the decision, see you in court.

“Like judicial decisions, commission adjudicatory decisions speak for themselves,” NRC senior attorney Charles Mullins said in a letter Thursday. “Concerns about their meaning, correctness or implementation should be addressed as part of the public adjudicatory process, not in informal correspondence among lawyers.”

Washington state is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit pending at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington against the NRC on the Yucca issue.

On the issue of what NRC intends to do next,  “We will reserve comments or statements on that point for any pleadings we file in court,” Mullins wrote.

The NRC has been winding down its Yucca Mountain activities over the past year, including archiving key documents and closing a hearing facility in Las Vegas.

The latest commission ruling directed its Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to wrap up its activities by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, and there is speculation that plaintiff attorneys will be in court soon seeking to halt that process.

The Obama administration requested no funding for the NRC to  continue Yucca Mountain activities into the new fiscal year, and the project already has been shut down at the Department of Energy.

It remains to be seen whether a stopgap budget Congress needs to pass in the next two weeks to keep the government running will contain NRC funding for Yucca.

While  House Republican leaders are seeking funding to keep the embers warm,  Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., has indicated he will work to keep Yucca out of the budget.