Opinion ID: 186276
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: jurisdiction

Text: Before addressing the merits of Nevada’s petition, we must consider two jurisdictional issues. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Env’t, 523 U.S. 83, 94-95, 101-02 (1998) (holding that federal courts must ensure that they have jurisdiction before considering the merits of a case). The first, relating to subject matter jurisdiction, arises because although the Hobbs Act, the jurisdictional statute invoked by all parties, gives courts of appeals exclusive jurisdiction to review orders issued by a host of federal agencies – including the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Maritime Commission – the Act nowhere mentions the Environmental Protection Agency. See 28 U.S.C. § 2342 (2000). Even so, we believe that the Act’s conferral of jurisdiction over rules issued by the nowdefunct AEC gives us jurisdiction to entertain the petitions in this case. The Hobbs Act authorizes courts of appeals to review ‘‘all final orders of the Atomic Energy Commission made reviewa17 ble by section 2239 of title 42.’’ Id. § 2342(4). In turn, section 2239 makes reviewable ‘‘[a]ny final order [of the Atomic Energy Commission],’’ 42 U.S.C. § 2239(b) (2000), that is entered in ‘‘any proceeding for the issuance or modification of rules and regulations dealing with the activities of licensees,’’ id. § 2239(a)(1)(A). The AEC’s authority to establish environmental standards to protect the public from radiation exposure, however, has since been transferred to EPA, and the AEC has been abolished. See Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970, § 2(a)(6), reprinted in 5 U.S.C. App. 1 (2000) (transferring to the EPA Administrator the ‘‘functions of the Atomic Energy Commission TTT administered through its Division of Radiation Protection Standards, to the extent that such functions of the Commission consist of establishing generally applicable environmental standards for the protection of the general environment from radioactive material’’); 42 U.S.C. § 5814(a) (2000) (abolishing the AEC). Given this transfer of authority, at least three circuits have held that EPA action undertaken pursuant to EPA’s AEC-transferred authority is reviewable under the Hobbs Act as if undertaken by the AEC itself. See Watkins, 939 F.2d at 712 n.4 (stating that EPA’s generic health and safety standards for nuclear waste repositories are reviewable under 42 U.S.C. § 2239(b)); NRDC v. EPA, 824 F.2d at 1267 n.7 (same); Quivira Mining Co. v. United States EPA, 728 F.2d 477, 481-84 (10th Cir. 1984) (finding Hobbs Act jurisdiction over EPA regulations addressing radiation releases from uranium fuel cycle operations). Going one step further, this circuit has held that agency action that ‘‘derives’’ from transferred authority is also reviewable under the Hobbs Act. See Aulenbeck, Inc. v. Fed. Highway Admin., 103 F.3d 156, 164-65 (D.C. Cir. 1997) (holding that the court had Hobbs Act jurisdiction to review Transportation Department rules addressing certain safety requirements because the agency’s power to issue those requirements ‘‘derive[d] in part’’ from its transferred authority and because actions taken pursuant to that transferred authority were subject to Hobbs Act review). This is just such a case. 18 In issuing its Yucca Mountain standards, EPA acted pursuant to authority derived from its AEC-transferred powers. When Congress, acting through EnPA section 801, required EPA to issue Yucca-specific, radiation-protection standards, it built on EPA authority – transferred from the AEC – to promulgate generally applicable standards to protect the public from radiation. See H.R. CONF. REP. NO. 102-1018, at 390 (1992), reprinted in 1992 U.S.C.C.A.N. 2472, 2481 (‘‘Section 801 [of EnPA] builds upon [the] existing authority of the [EPA] Administrator to set generally applicable [radiationprotection] standardsTTTT’’). Because EPA’s authority to promulgate its Yucca rule thus ‘‘derives’’ from its AECtransferred powers, we may consider petitioners’ challenge to part 197 under our Hobbs Act jurisdiction. See Aulenbeck, 103 F.3d at 165. The second jurisdictional issue concerns EPA’s claim that neither Nevada’s nor the environmental petitioners’ constitutional standing is ‘‘self-evident.’’ Respondent’s Br. at 21. To establish Article III standing to sue on behalf of their members, NRDC and the other environmental petitioners must show that ‘‘(a) [their] members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right; (b) the interests [they] seek[ ] to protect are germane to [their] purpose; and (c) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.’’ Hunt v. Wash. State Apple Adver. Comm’n, 432 U.S. 333, 343 (1977). Under the first element of this test, the environmental petitioners must show that at least one of their members meets the ‘‘irreducible constitutional minimum’’ of standing, i.e., injuryin-fact, causation, and redressability. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560-61 (1992). ‘‘The burden on a party challenging an administrative decision in the court of appeals is to show a substantial probability that it has been injured, that the [respondent] caused its injury, and that the court could redress that injury.’’ Rainbow/PUSH Coalition v. FCC, 330 F.3d 539, 542 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). Moreover, the asserted injury must be both ‘‘concrete and particularized’’ as well as ‘‘actual or imminent.’’ Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560. 19 To demonstrate standing, the environmental petitioners rely on declarations by several of their members, including one by Ed Goedhart, a member of petitioners Citizen Alert and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. See Decl. of Ed Goedhart ¶ 1. Goedhart states that he lives and works in Amargosa Valley, Nevada, eighteen miles from Yucca Mountain. Id. ¶ 2. He alleges that EPA’s failure to adopt more stringent radiation-protection standards will permit hazardous radionuclides from the buried waste to contaminate his community’s ground-water supplies, causing adverse health effects. See id. ¶¶ 2-7. These allegations are more than sufficient to give Goedhart standing to sue in his own right. The claimed injury to his ground-water supply is neither hypothetical nor conjectural. Indeed, EPA itself acknowledges that ‘‘[t]he boundaries of the town [of Amargosa Valley] include all of the area where the highest potential doses from a repository at Yucca Mountain are anticipatedTTTT’’ Final Background Information Document at 8-13. Although radionuclides escaping from the Yucca repository may not reach Goedhart’s community for thousands of years, his injury is ‘‘actual or imminent,’’ for he lives adjacent to the land where the Government plans to bury 70,000 metric tons of radioactive waste – a sufficient harm in and of itself. See La. Envtl. Action Network v. United States EPA, 172 F.3d 65, 67-68 (D.C. Cir. 1999) (holding that an environmental group established constitutional standing where its members lived near a landfill into which an EPA regulation allegedly would permit certain hazardous wastes to be deposited). In addition, this harm is ‘‘fairly traceable,’’ Lujan, 504 U.S. at 560 (internal quotation marks omitted), to EPA’s allegedly lax radiation-protection standards, and favorable relief, i.e., requiring EPA to make more stringent each aspect of the rule that petitioners challenge, would likely redress his harm. Nor have we any doubt that Goedhart has prudential standing. To establish prudential standing, a party’s ‘‘grievance must arguably fall within the zone of interests protected or regulated by the statutory provision or constitutional guarantee invoked in the suit.’’ Bennett v. Spear, 520 U.S. 154, 20 162 (1997). Goedhart’s grievance clearly falls within the Energy Policy Act’s ‘‘zone of interests,’’ for that Act seeks to ensure that DOE operates the Yucca repository safely, i.e., without endangering the lives or health of the surrounding population. See EnPA § 801(a)(1) (directing EPA to promulgate ‘‘public health and safety standards for protection of the public from releases from radioactive materials’’). Because the Government does not argue that the environmental petitioners fail either the germaneness or the individual-participation element of associational standing, and because ‘‘we [too] have [no] reason to believe that [they] fail[ ] to satisfy [these] latter two requirements,’’ Sierra Club v. EPA, 292 F.3d 895, 898 (D.C. Cir. 2002), we conclude that the environmental petitioners have established standing to bring their petition for review. And since only one petitioner requires standing, we need not consider the Government’s separate challenge to Nevada’s standing. See Military Toxics Project v. EPA, 146 F.3d 948, 954 (D.C. Cir. 1998). We thus turn to the merits of Nevada’s petition.