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A federal judge last week ruled that Entergy’s Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant—Vermont’s only reactor—can remain operating beyond a state-mandated shutdown deadline. State laws that would force the closure of the 40-year-old plant, which recently garnered a 20-year operating license extension from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), are preempted by federal law, the judge said.

In response to a recent decision by a federal court judge that reinstates rules stayed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in early 2011 and that govern hazardous air pollutant standards for industrial boilers and commercial and industrial solid waste incinerators—so-called Boiler MACT rules—EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said the agency was committed not to enforce those standards until April, when a new revised suite of boiler standards will be finalized.

Over the next two decades, the U.S. power profile will be markedly different as generation from coal declines, natural gas power and renewables surge, and nuclear generation decreases slightly, said the Energy Information Administration (EIA) in its early release version of the Annual Energy Outlook 2012 on Monday. The full report, scheduled to be released this spring, presents updated projections of U.S. energy markets through 2035.

President Barack Obama championed an “all-out, all-of-the-above strategy” in Tuesday’s State of the Union address to develop all U.S. energy sources, though his focus rested on renewables and natural gas—with no mention of coal or nuclear power.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on Monday issued its first pilot project license to Verdant Power’s 1,050-kW Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy (RITE) project.

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) funding selection criteria to private companies could be improved by requiring applicants to provide guided explanations of why private investors were unwilling to fund projects, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds in a new report.

The Department of Energy (DOE) on Friday announced a draft funding opportunity to establish cost-shared agreements with private industry for the design and licensing of small modular reactors (SMR), targeting their deployment by 2022.

Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, plans to lay off 2,355 employees (about 10% of its workforce), reduce its fixed costs by more than €150 million ($192 million), reorganize management, and close one of its 26 factories in preparation for a potential slowdown in the U.S. wind market in case the production tax credit is not extended at the end of 2012, the Danish firm said on Thursday.

A lease-purchase transaction for a new combined cycle plant in Rogersville, Tenn., completed by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) on Tuesday could provide the U.S. government–owned corporation $1 billion in financing to support completion of the 1,260-MW Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., by 2020.

Électricité de France (EDF), Constellation Energy’s partner in five nuclear plants on three sites in Maryland and New York and a 7.2% owner of Constellation shares, on Tuesday withdrew its opposition to a $7.9 billion merger between Baltimore-based Constellation and Chicago-based Exelon Corp. The French company said it had reached an agreement with Exelon to protect the “operational autonomy” of the Constellation Energy Nuclear Group (CENG).