A district court ordered the Bureau of Ocean Exploration Management, Regulation, and Enforcement to act on five pending deepwater drilling permit applications within 30 days. The permit applicant met all the necessary requirements for a preliminary injunction. The Outer Continental Shelf Lan...

The Ninth Circuit, in a case concerning the NRC's approval of a proposed interim spent fuel storage installation at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, held that the NRC's refusal to grant a nonprofit group access to sensitive information in a closed adjudicatory hearing was not arbitrary, capric...

The Ninth Circuit vacated and remanded DOE's energy transmission congestion study and national interest electric transmission (NIET) corridor designations prepared under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct). The EPAct added §216 to the Federal Power Act, requiring DOE to prepare the conges...

A district court held DOI in contempt of court for imposing a second moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the court preliminarily enjoined the agency from enforcing the agency's original moratorium. Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, DOI issued a six-mo...

The Federal Claims court ordered DOE to pay three utility companies $10,632,454.83 for failing to collect spent nuclear fuel from the Wolf Creek Generating Station in Kansas in violation of their contract. The utilities' damages derive from their investigation of alternative spent nuclear fu...

A district court held that CERCLA's statute of limitations does not bar the United States from recovering certain costs it incurred in 1993 and 1995 responding to soil and ground water contamination at the Fletcher Paint Works and Storage Facility Superfund site in Milford, New Hampshire. Af...

A district court granted in part and denied in part cross-motions for summary judgment on claims that the U.S. Army failed to comply with two settlement agreements requiring it to conduct and complete subsurface archaeological surveys of its munitions training grounds on the Makua Military R...

The D.C. Circuit granted a petition challenging the NRC's transfer of regulatory authority over nuclear material to the state of New Jersey. Before transferring authority to a state, the NRC must find that the state's regulatory regime is compatible with the NRC's program. To evaluate the co...

A Wisconsin appellate court held that an insurer has no duty to indemnify a manufacturing company for costs it incurred cleaning up private landowners' property that was part of a larger environmental remediation effort required by the government. The parties previously stipulated that the insurer w...

A district court denied an energy company's motion to dismiss CERCLA claims filed against it for reimbursement costs incurred by the former owner of a contaminated site, but granted its motion to dismiss the owner's contribution claims under CERCLA §113. The former site owner entered into an admini...