The court upholds a lower court decision that the United States has no obligation to reimburse a Florida county for the costs it incurred treating soil and groundwater contamination at the Miami International Air Depot. From 1943 to 1966, the U.S. government maintained and repaired U.S. Air Force ai...

The court holds that petitioners lack standing to challenge a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rule that revised regulations governing the exemption standards for the transportation of radioactive material. The petitioners argue that the NRC violated the National Environmental Policy Act in prepa...

The court denies Nevada's petition for review of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) final environmental impact statement (EIS) for a nuclear waste underground repository and a portion of its record of decision governing the transportation of nuclear waste from production sources to Yucca Mounta...

The court upheld a lower court decision dismissing an environmental service company's patent infringement suit against a hazardous waste remediation contractor. The contractor was hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to clean up a lead-contaminated parcel of land near Colonie, New York. The com...

The Tenth Circuit upheld a lower court decision denying a citizen group's lawsuit to enjoin the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) approved operation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a nuclear waste repository located in southeastern New Mexico. The group argued that DOE relied on faulty data re...

The court held unripe a petition challenging the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) decision to grant a license permitting the construction and operation of a spent nuclear fuel storage facility on land belonging to the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians in Utah. After the NRC approved the li...

The Federal Claims Court held that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) must pay two nuclear utilities over $77 million in damages for failing to commence performance of its contract to accept, transport, and dispose of the utilities' spent nuclear fuel. Under the contract, DOE was to start accepting...

A Michigan appellate court upheld a lower court's imposition of over $2.5 million in penalties against the owners of a gas station for failing to comply with certain orders and statutory requirements in remediating contamination due to leaking underground storage tanks at the site. The trial court a...

The Fourth Circuit affirmed an award of attorney fees in a citizen suit brought under the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act with respect to the preliminary injunction phase of the litigation, but reversed fees awarded for the supplemental claims phase. The supplemental phase included plaint...

The D.C. Circuit upheld the U.S. Department of the Interior's (DOI's) interpretation of "valid existing rights" in a 1999 rule to foreclose surface mining operations in sensitive areas. A mining association argued that Congress inserted "valid existing rights" in the Surface Mining Control and Recla...