A district court approved two consent decrees settling Colorado's claims for natural resource damages against two waste companies and the city and county of Denver in connection with the Lowry Landfill Superfund site. The settlement, which requires the performing parties to each pay $500,000...

A district court, on motions for reconsideration and for leave to amend counterclaims, held that a gas company may seek recovery costs under CERCLA and the Michigan Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act against the plaintiffs in the case. The plaintiffs seek recovery of costs they ...

A Washington appellate court held that the former owners of contaminated property may be held liable under the state's Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA). Fifteen years after the former owner sold the property to a port, the port notified the former owners that they were potentially liable part...

A district court held that the owners of contaminated property may be held liable under RCRA for obstructing the former owner's ability to clean up the site. After purchasing the property from a power company, the owners filed suit against the power company under RCRA. The company then filed...

A district court denied a property owner's motion to add RCRA claims to its CERCLA and state law action against a dry cleaner for groundwater contamination. The property owner failed to comply with RCRA's notice requirements. The boilerplate and conclusory RCRA notices provided by the owner fai...

The D.C. Circuit denied a petition challenging a magnesium plant's inclusion on the NPL. EPA uses a hazard ranking system (HRS) to determine whether to place a site on the NPL. Petitioners argued that EPA erred in calculating the HRS score and that if these errors were corrected, the site's ...

The Federal Circuit upheld a lower court decision awarding an energy company $42.7 million for the government's breach of contract relating to spent nuclear fuel (SNF) storage costs at one of the company's facilities. Included in the company's claim for interim storage costs were the costs incu...

The Second Circuit affirmed a lower court decision that the parent corporation of nine manufactured gas plants (MGPs) is not an "operator" of those plants for purposes of CERCLA liability. The current owners of the MGP sites filed suit against the parent corporation, seeking to recover costs th...

The D.C. Circuit vacated an NRC decision in which it refused to consider the value of a company's "goodwill" in determining whether the company was exempt from certain financial requirements necessary for the decommissioning of a uranium processing plant. In 2007 and 2008, the NRC granted th...

The First Circuit affirmed a natural gas company's conviction for storing hazardous waste without a permit in violation of RCRA. The company is precluded from challenging a 2002 EPA rule authorizing Rhode Island's RCRA regulations because it failed to use the proper statutory procedure for j...