The Coal City Unit 1 School District yet again has filed a complaint with the Grundy County Tax Assessor’s office over the valuation of GE Hitachi’s Morris operation, a one-of-a-kind nuclear waste storage facility.

This is the fourth year in a row that Coal City schools have filed a complaint, and this year the district has again tapped Whitt Law to file the complaint.

Superintendent Chris Spencer told the board if this goes through, it allows the district to collect that money.

“Reminder, this nuclear facility is unlike any in the country,” Spencer said. “We’ve been housing, we as a community, spent nuclear fuel since the 1970s, a lot of it unknown until the last few years.”

Spencer told the Morris Herald-News back in Nov. 2024 that the spent fuel was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but that project never came to fruition. The waste continues to sit in Coal City’s backyard.

Yucca Mountain is about 90 miles north of Las Vegas, and has a five-mile tunnel that was part of a project to store nuclear waste. However, that project met opposition, and the state of Nevada’s official position is that the Yucca Mountain site is a bad place to house nuclear waste and spent nuclear fuel.