Public Watchdogs v. Southern California Edison Co.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in a case in which a district court and the Ninth Circuit held that the district court did not have jurisdiction to consider claims challenging the decommissioning process for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California. The plaintiff’s allegations had included that projected sea level rise could have “catastrophic” results due to the planned storage of spent nuclear fuel in cannisters within 108 feet of the ocean.

A nonprofit group filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of California to block implementation of the decommissioning plan for the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS) in California. The defendants are the utilities that own SONGS, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the manufacturer of canisters used for storage of spent nuclear fuel. The complaint asserted that the NRC’s approval of the plan violated the Administrative Procedure Act and that the plan constituted a public nuisance. The complaint also asserted a strict products liability claim against the canister manufacturer. The plaintiff alleged that the defendants were “risking the lives of millions of California residents and the prospect of irreparable harm to the environment by removing spent nuclear fuel from a storage location specifically designed and used for that purpose for decades,” transporting it into defective canisters, and “dropping it into holes a mere 108 feet from one of California’s most populated public beaches, within a tsunami zone, surrounded by active fault lines.” Among the risks alleged in the complaint were that if sea levels rise at the rate projected by climate change experts, the results could be “catastrophic.”