Court Denies Nuke Relicensing Contention

An panel of appellate court judges has upheld a previous denial and has ruled against a group of Portsmouth area environmentalists who feel they were unjustly blocked from having a full hearing on part of the controversial Seabrook Station reliscensing process.

The local environmentalist groups, led by Beyond Nuclear, the New Hampshire Sierra Club and the Seacoast Anti-Pollution League, filed an appeal after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied granting a hearing on the nuclear power plant's environmental report. The petitioners claimed that the NRC was "capricious" and didn't properly apply case law for its justification of denying a hearing on the report, in which the petitioners feel NextEra Energy, which owns the plant, didn't fully explore offshore wind electric generation as an alternative to a new 20-year license extension for Seabrook Station.

Three United States Court of Appeals judges sided Friday with the NRC, though, outlining several points within a 24-page document to support their ruling.

"Neither argument is persuasive, and for the reasons set forth below, we deny BN's petition for review," wrote the judges overseeing the appeal. "The party's criticism of a portion of the applicant's environmental report does not meet the requirements of the regulations as to the admission of a contention.

"We hold that the NRC's decision to deny admissibility to BN's contention constituted reasoned decisionmaking and was not arbitrary or capricious."

[UPDATE: The environmentalists have issued a statement about the denial, slamming the court for not giving the public a "voice" or a "meaningful review of wind energy."]

Among the reasons for denial are (as stated in the ruling, which is attached as a PDF to this story):

• There was no challenge by BN to the fact that storing wind power is too costly to be commercially viable;
• The data submitted by BN did not demonstrate that offshore wind farms would provide timely and feasible baseload power;
• BN's own exhibits stated that the lack of "requisite technology is an obvious barrier to establishment of the deep-water wind industry in Maine or elsewhere in the near term," and that essential infrastructure for installation, transmission, and maintenance does not yet exist;
• The Board had supplied a basis for BN's contention that BN did not itself make, that interconnected offshore wind farms could constitute a single, discrete energy source, but this error was deemed harmless.
• BN failed to even argue that the baseload requirement was inappropriate; and
• Its exhibits did not raise a genuine dispute as to the viability and feasibility of offshore wind to meet baseload requirements by 2030.

The May 25, 2010, Seabrook Station environmental report — filed as part of the application to renew the plant's license, which expires on March 15, 2030 — outlined four sources of energy that could be an alternative to extending Seabrook Station's license to 2050, according to the judges' ruling.

Those sources were natural gas-fired generation, coal-fired generation, a new nuclear plant, and power purchases, but not wind power because it would be "too expensive to resolve" issues with the intermittent nature of baseload wind power generation, according to NextEra.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board did originally determine Beyond Nuclear’s contention about the wind power section of the report was admissible, although the NRC later reversed the decision and denied the hearing. The NRC stated the ASLB "erred in admitting the contention" because petitioners didn't provide "sufficient information to show that a genuine dispute exists with the applicant/licensee on a material issue of law or fact," among other things.

Contentions about the feasibility of offshore wind power can still be admitted into the relicensing process, according to the judges, but only if "new information about the technical and economic feasibility of offshore wind as a source of baseload power, which differs materially from that which was available when the contention at issue was filed, becomes available prior to
Seabrook's license renewal."

NRC regulations would also only permit the filing of a new contention if the contention meets the "admissibility requirements," wrote the judges.