National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners v. United States Department of Energy

Each year, nuclear-power-plant owners were required to pay about $750 million in fees to the United States Department of Energy (department) (defendant). The fees were intended to cover the costs of the government’s long-term disposal of civilian nuclear waste. The secretary of energy was obligated by the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act (nuclear-waste act) to evaluate annually whether the fees collected from nuclear-power-plant owners for nuclear-waste disposal were sufficient to offset the costs of a nuclear-waste-disposal program. Since 1987, the department had been directed to consider only Yucca Mountain as a potential site for nuclear-waste disposal. The department collected fees from nuclear-power-plant owners for many years with Yucca Mountain as the potential disposal site. In 2008, the secretary of energy estimated the total cost of the disposal program at Yucca Mountain to be $97 billion; however, this figure included an extra $30 billion that the nuclear-power-plant owners were not liable to pay. The commencement date for construction of the disposal site at Yucca Mountain was continually pushed back until 2009, when the administration determined that Yucca Mountain was no longer an option for the disposal site. In 2010, nuclear-power-plant owners sought a suspension of annual fees that were collected pursuant to the nuclear-waste act by the secretary of energy because there was no longer a viable disposal site after the removal of Yucca Mountain from consideration. However, the secretary of energy determined that the $97 billion cost estimate for Yucca Mountain still served as an adequate proxy for estimated costs of a nuclear-waste-disposal program. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) (plaintiff) brought a suit against the department, arguing the secretary had violated the nuclear-waste act in failing to conduct a cost evaluation and failing to account for the uncertainty of the disposal program’s schedule given that no potential disposal sites were under consideration. NARUC also argued that the department’s use of Yucca Mountain as a proxy for estimated future costs was arbitrary and capricious because the department had decided not to use Yucca Mountain as a disposal site.