Just as Holtec International has hit a potentially significant pothole in its road to restart the moribund Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, Constellation Energy says it has a deal to restart its shuttered Three Mile Island Unit 1 in Pennsylvania. Is this a trend, or just a limited instance of life after nuclear death? There’s… More Nuclear Recommissioning: Palisades problem, TMI 1 to restart
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is pushing back against a recent gas pipeline ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals from the D.C. Circuit. The court in July vacated FERC’s approval of a Transco project to move gas from the Marcellus shale region of Pennsylvania to New Jersey, ruling that the agency’s 2023 approval was… More FERC’s Phillips pushes back on pipeline decisions
Welcome to Baku, population 2 million. Capital of Azerbaijan, population 10 million. Remember COP28? Forget about it. Most everybody else has. This is COP29, Nov. 11-24, 2024. It will be the 29th annual international greenwashing gabfest about the world’s promised actions to deal with a climate being changed by man-made global warming. Most of those… More Commentary: The curtain rises on COP29
Ohio-based investor-owned utility holding company FirstEnergy Sept. 12 agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission a $100 million settlement in the long-running nuclear bribery scandal that has seen prominent Ohio politicians and political players jailed. At the same time, Ohio’s attorney general indicted two former top company executives on further bribery charges in the… More FirstEnergy pays another $100M fine in bribe case, two former execs indicted
The D.C. Circuit appeals court has upheld the authority of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to license private, away-from-reactor storage of spent nuclear fuel, adding to confusion to the gnarly issue of what to do with high-level nuclear waste. With federal circuit courts in collision, it may take the U.S. Supreme Court to sort it… More Nuke waste confusion continues with D.C. Circuit ruling
In a case brought by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, a federal court in Maryland has seriously unsettled oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico, ruling that a 2020 decision by the National Marine Fisheries Service violates the Endangered Species Act. The U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland Aug.19… More Endangered Species Act decision roils Gulf of Mexico O&G
By Henry Sokolski Late last month, the House Intelligence Committee chairman volunteered that Iran could declare itself a nuclear weapons state by the end of the year. And earlier this month, the U.S. intelligence community warned that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do… More Guest Commentary: Nuclear proliferation will dominate the next president’s agenda
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management wants to expand a siting and permitting plan for solar energy projects on Western public lands in 11 states in a solar energy development proposal announced in January. The new BLM “Western Solar Plan” announced late last month (Aug. 29) consists of a final environmental impact statement and… More BLM to open 31 million Western acres to solar development
Despite the Biden administration’s enthusiasm for capturing carbon emissions from power plant and ethanol manufacturers, moving the CO2 by pipeline and storing it underground, other barriers continue to raise problems for the young technology. While technology to capture CO2 stack emissions has well-known problems, those appear to be engineering and economic issues, more likely to… More Legal landmines face CO2 pipelines
By David Wojick The State of Maine just got a very strange offshore wind lease from the Feds. They call it a research lease as opposed to a commercial development lease. It has some mysterious features that are worth pondering. There may even be a many-billion-dollar trick here. We consider that at the end, after… More Guest Commentary: Maine’s mysterious offshore wind lease