The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on Tuesday that South Carolina did not have standing to sue the United States Department of Energy over the termination of construction of a nuclear processing facility.

Originally, South Carolina had sought to prevent the termination of the nuclear processing facility through two claims. First, South Carolina claimed that the United States Department of Energy had failed to “prepare a supplemental Environmental Impact Statement analyzing the long-term storage of plutonium in the state.” Second, South Carolina claimed that the United States Department of Energy had failed to “follow statutory waiver provisions for terminating construction of the facility.” However, the Fourth Circuit found that South Carolina did not have standing for either of those claims.

The Fourth Circuit found that South Carolina had no standing in part because the state’s theory of standing rested on a “highly attenuated chain of possibilities” that was “too speculative to give rise to a sufficiently concrete injury-in-fact.”