The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has issued another landmark decision under the National Environmental Policy Act. The ruling in Scientists' Institute for Public Information, Inc. v. Atomic Energy Commission, reprinted in full at 3 ELR 20525, goes significantly beyond the court's earlier decisions in Calvert Cliffs¹ and NRDC v. Morton.² After three years of litigation that has largely focused on the application of NEPA's action-forcing requirements to discrete federal projects, SIPI shifts attention to NEPA's impact on the earliest phases of agency policy formulation and program development.³

The case deals with the AEC's long-range commitment to develop the Liquid-Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR), so-called because of its capacity to generate fuel for other reactors. Research in the area has been encouraged within the AEC for over 20 years, with Congress recently appropriating an average of $100 million per year for the program. Future outlays will bring the total to about $2 billion by 1980, as much as that spent federally for the development of all other energy sources combined. The AEC estimates that by the year 2000, one-fourth of all electrical energy in the United States will be produced by LMFBRs. At that same time, the breeder will have also produced 600,000 cubic feet of high-level concentrated radioactive wastes that will retain harmful levels of radioactivity for hundreds of years. In light of the program's rapid movement toward implementation and its potential environmental hazards, the plaintiffs requested that a programmatic impact statement assessing aggregate effects and technological alternatives be filed now while the program is still in the research and development stages.