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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Circuit ruled unanimously on Friday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) erred in deciding that spent nuclear fuel (SNF) from the nation’s power plants could be stored as long as 60 years after a plant’s operating license expires.

Duke Energy and Progress Energy received conditional approval for their merger from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on June 8. The companies plan to close their merger, which would create the nationís largest utility, by the targeted date of July 1.

Mayors of more than 90 U.S. cities have signed a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lisa Jackson voicing their support for the recent EPA Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Power Plants (MATS).

All indications from Wednesday’s Senate Environment and Public Works Committee joint hearing are that Dr. Alison Macfarlane will been confirmed as the new chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and that Commissioner Kristine Svinicki will be approved for a second term. Macfarlane, a nuclear waste expert who served on the White House’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Americaís Nuclear Future, was nominated by President Barack Obama last month after Chairman Gregory Jaczko, whose leadership style was described by commissioners from both political parties as abusive, resigned May 21.

Regulated utility South Carolina Electric & Gas (SCE&G) last week filed plans with the Public Service Commission of South Carolina to retire up to six coal-fired units—a total capacity of 750 MW—by 2018. The units are some of the utility’s “oldest and smallest,” and it would not be a “good business decision” to add costly environmental control equipment to these plants, SCE&G said.

American Electric Power (AEP) last week temporarily withdrew a $1 billion plan to retrofit its 49-year-old Big Sandy coal-fired plant near Louisa, Ky., from the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC), saying it wanted to reevaluate alternatives to meeting the company’s obligations under the recently finalized federal Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, the Mercury and Air Toxic Standard, and other environmental standards.

A federal court on Friday ruled that collection of a fee by the Department of Energy that totaled nearly $750 million a year from nuclear generators for nuclear waste disposal since 1983 was “legally defective” because development of the Yucca Mountain permanent spent fuel waste facility had been discontinued. But in lieu of suspending the fee, the court ordered the DOE to conduct a reevaluation of the Nuclear Waste Fund within six months.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week issued a Notice of Data Availability (NODA) as a supplement to its April 2011 proposed rule for cooling water intake structures at all existing power facilities as part of section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act.

A report released on Friday by consultants at the Brattle Group concludes that tripling peak wholesale power prices in Texas (from $3,000/MWh to $9,000/MWh by 2015), as is being considered by Texas utility commissioners and grid operators to encourage power plant construction in the power-strapped state, would only raise the region’s reserve margin to 10% above peak demand—less than the 13.75% reserve margin recommended by federal regulators.

Nearly three-quarters of the 74 transmission line outages were caused by fallen trees during a snowstorm that hit the Northeast in October 2011 and shut off the lights for more than 3.2 million homes and businesses, concludes a report released jointly by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC).