NRC Will Hold Public Meeting August 1 To Discuss Potential Restart of Palisades Nuclear Plant

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: III-24-021 July 25, 2024
Contact: Viktoria Mitlyng, 630-829-9662 Prema Chandrathil, 630-829-9663

NRC Will Hold Public Meeting August 1 To Discuss Potential Restart of Palisades Nuclear Plant

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission will hold a hybrid public meeting that will include the agency’s update on the plant’s readiness to potentially resume operation and a presentation from Holtec International on restart-related activities.

The meeting will be held at the Grand Upton Hall, Lake Michigan College, 2755 E. Napier Ave., in Benton Harbor. Information for attending virtually or by phone can be found in the meeting notice.

Palisades permanently ceased operations in May 2022. In early 2023, Holtec International, the Palisades license holder, expressed interest in returning the plant to an operational status. The NRC created the Palisades Restart Panel to guide staff efforts to review, inspect, and determine if Palisades could be safely returned to operation.

The presentations will be followed by a question and comment session for attendees to engage with panel members on the NRC’s presentation. In-person attendees will be given priority to speak. Additional information on a potential Palisades restart can be found on the NRC’s website.

24-021-iii.pdf

It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-02-21/radioactive-waste-ocean-dumping-los-angeles-coast

It’s not just toxic chemicals. Radioactive waste was also dumped off Los Angeles coast

A research expedition led by UC Santa Barbara came across old discarded barrels sitting 3,000 feet underwater near Santa Catalina Island. (David Valentine / ROV Jason)
BY ROSANNA XIASTAFF WRITER
FEB. 21, 2024 5 AM PT

For decades, a graveyard of corroding barrels has littered the seafloor just off the coast of Los Angeles. It was out of sight, out of mind — a not-so-secret secret that haunted the marine environment until a team of researchers came across them with an advanced underwater camera.

Speculation abounded as to what these mysterious barrels might contain. Startling amounts of DDT near the barrels pointed to a little-known history of toxic pollution from what was once the largest DDT manufacturer in the nation, but federal regulators recently determined that the manufacturer had not bothered with barrels. (Its acid waste was poured straight into the ocean instead.)

Now, as part of an unprecedented reckoning with the legacy of ocean dumping in Southern California, scientists have concluded the barrels may actually contain low-level radioactive waste. Records show that from the 1940s through the 1960s, it was not uncommon for local hospitals, labs and other industrial operations to dispose barrels of tritium, carbon-14 and other similar waste at sea.


“This is a classic situation of bad versus worse. It’s bad we have potential low-level radioactive waste just sitting there on the seafloor. It’s worse that we have DDT compounds spread across a wide area of the seafloor at concerning concentrations,” said David Valentine, whose research team at UC Santa Barbara had first discovered the barrels and sparked concerns of what could be inside. “The question we grapple with now is how bad and how much worse.”

This latest revelation from Valentine’s team was published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology as part of a broader, highly anticipated study that lays the groundwork for understanding just how much DDT is spread across the seafloor — and how the contamination might still be moving 3,000 feet underwater.

A man wearing an orange hard hat and life vest holds a device made of clear tubes while standing on the deck of a ship.
David Valentine, whose team at UC Santa Barbara has been researching the legacy of DDT dumping in the deep ocean, prepares to collect more sediment samples from the seafloor. (Austin Straub / For The Times)
Public concerns have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972 following Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” is still haunting the marine environment in insidious ways. Scientists continue to trace significant amounts of this decades-old “forever chemical” all the way up the marine food chain, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in California sea lions.

Dozens of ecotoxicologists and marine scientists are now trying to fill key data gaps, and the findings so far have been one plot twist after another. A research team led by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography just recently set sail to help map and identify as many barrels as possible on the seafloor — only to discover a multitude of discarded military explosives from the World War II era.

And in the process of digging up old records, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered that from the 1930s to the early 1970s, 13 other areas off the Southern California coast had also been approved for dumping of military explosives, radioactive waste and various refinery byproducts — including 3 million metric tons of petroleum waste.

Massive dumping ground of WWII-era munitions discovered off Los Angeles coast


In the study published this week, Valentine found high concentrations of DDT spread across a wide swath of seafloor larger than the city of San Francisco. His team has been collecting hundreds of sediment samples as part of a methodical, large-scale effort to map the footprint of the dumping and analyze how the chemical might be moving through the water and whether it has broken down. After many trips out to sea, they still have yet to find the boundary of the dump site, but concluded that much of the DDT in the deep ocean remains in its most potent form.

Further analysis, using carbon-dating methods, determined that the DDT dumping peaked in the 1950s, when Montrose Chemical Corp. of California was still operating near Torrance during the pesticide’s postwar heyday — and prior to the onset of formal ocean dumping regulations.

Clues pointing to the radioactive waste emerged in the process of sorting through this DDT history.

Jacob Schmidt, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in Valentine’s lab, combed through hundreds of pages of old records and tracked down seven lines of evidence indicating that California Salvage, the same company tasked with pouring the DDT waste off the coast of Los Angeles, had also dumped low-level radioactive waste while out at sea.

The company, now defunct, had received a permit in 1959 to dump containerized radioactive waste about 150 miles offshore, according to the U.S. Federal Register. Although archived notes by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission say the permit was never activated, other records show California Salvage advertised its radioactive waste disposal services and received waste in the 1960s from a radioisotope facility in Burbank, as well as barrels of tritium and carbon-14 from a regional Veterans Administration hospital facility.


Old discarded barrels sitting 3,000 feet underwater near Santa Catalina Island.
A research expedition led by UC Santa Barbara came across old discarded barrels sitting 3,000 feet underwater near Santa Catalina Island. (David Valentine / ROV Jason)
Given recent revelations that the people in charge of getting rid of the DDT waste sometimes took shortcuts and just dumped it closer to port, researchers say they would not be surprised if the radioactive waste had also been dumped closer than 150 miles offshore.

“There’s quite a bit of a paper trail,” Valentine said. “It’s all circumstantial, but the circumstances seem to point toward this company that would take whatever waste people gave them and barge it offshore … with the other liquid wastes that we know they were dumping at the time.”

Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist who was not affiliated with the study, said that generally speaking, some of the more abundant radioactive isotopes that were dumped into the ocean at the time — such as tritium — would have largely decayed in the past 80 years. But many questions remain on what other potentially more hazardous isotopes could’ve been dumped.

The sobering reality, he noted, is that it wasn’t until the 1970s that people started to take radioactive waste to landfills rather than dump it in the ocean.

He pulled out an old map published by the International Atomic Energy Agency that noted from 1946 to 1970, more than 56,000 barrels of radioactive waste had been dumped into the Pacific Ocean on the U.S. side. And across the world even today, low-level radioactive waste is still being released into the ocean by nuclear power plants and decommissioned plants such as the one in Fukushima, Japan.

Screenshot of a black and white map from a 1999 International Atomic Energy Agency report.
In a 1999 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency titled “Inventory of radioactive waste disposals at sea,” a grainy map shows that at least 56,261 containers of radioactive waste were dumped into the Pacific Ocean from 1946 to 1970. (International Atomic Energy Agency)
“The problem with the oceans as a dumping solution is once it’s there, you can’t go back and get it,” said Buesseler, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and director of the Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity. “These 56,000 barrels, for example, we’re never going to get them back.”


Mark Gold, an environmental scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council who has worked on the toxic legacy of DDT for more than 30 years, said it is unsettling to think just how big the consequences of ocean dumping might be across the country and the world. Scientists have discovered DDT, military explosives and now radioactive waste off the Los Angeles coast because they knew to look. But what about all the other dump sites where no one’s looking?

“The more we look, the more we find, and every new bit of information seems to be scarier than the last,” said Gold, who called on federal officials to act more boldly on this information. “This has shown just how egregious and harmful the dumping has been off our nation’s coasts, and that we have no idea how big of an issue and how big of a problem this is nationally.”

U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara), in a letter signed this week by 22 fellow members of Congress, urged the Biden administration to commit dedicated long-term funding to both studying and remediating the issue. (Congress has so far allocated more than $11 million in one-time funding that led to many of these initial scientific findings, and an additional $5.2 million in state funding recently kicked off 18 more months of research.)

“While DDT was banned more than 50 years ago, we still have only a murky picture of its potential impacts to human health, national security and ocean ecosystems,” the lawmakers said. “We encourage the administration to think about the next 50 years, creating a long-term national plan within EPA and [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] to address this toxic legacy off the coast of our communities.”

As for the EPA, regulators urged the growing research effort to stay focused on the agency’s most burning questions: Is this legacy contamination still moving through the ocean in a way that threatens the marine environment or human health? And if so, is there a potential path for remediation?

EPA scientists have also been refining their own sampling plan, in collaboration with a number of government agencies, to get a grasp of the many other chemicals that had been dumped into the ocean. The hope, they said, is that all these research efforts combined will ultimately inform how future investigations of other offshore dump sites — whether along the Southern California coast or elsewhere in the country — could be conducted.

“It’s extremely overwhelming. … There’s still so much we don’t know,” said John Chesnutt, a Superfund section manager who has been leading the EPA’s technical team on the ocean dumping investigation. “Whether it’s radioactivity or explosives or what have you, there’s potentially a wide range of contaminants out there that aren’t good for the environment and the food web, if they’re really moving through it.”
Newsletter

‘Near miss’ incident reported at nuclear waste site near Carlsbad - Carlsbad Current-Argus JULY 19, 2024

‘Near miss’ incident reported at [WIPP] nuclear waste site near Carlsbad - Carlsbad Current-Argus JULY 19, 2024

https://www.currentargus.com/2024/07/near-miss-incident-reported-at-nuclear-waste-site-near-carlsbad/

...“Significant operational incidents persisted at WIPP following the safety stand-down in April,” the report read. “The (Department of Energy) Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) is considering formal mechanisms to transmit to SIMCO its concerns about the trend of unsafe work practices at WIPP. The Board’s staff will continue monitoring progress with improving the safety culture at WIPP.”

Meanwhile, the DNFSB sent a letter to the U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, raising concerns that the final design of a rebuild of WIPP’s ventilation system known as the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System (SSCVS) did not demonstrate its ability to properly function in the underground, in environments with combustion products from fire and salt amid mining activities.

Construction on the SSCVS was completed in May, and it was being commissioned via various tests as the $486 million project was prepared for operations, increasing available airflow in the WIPP underground from 170,000 cubic feet per minute (cfm) to 540,000 cfm. The DNFSB said the “tentative date” for SIMCO to take over the system’s operations from its subcontractor was Aug. 26, 2024. The DOE was preparing a response to the DNFSB’s letter on the SSCVS...

Donna

US senators urge Biden admin to not fund nuclear fuel reprocessing

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/US-senators-urge-Biden-admin-to-not-fund-nuclear-fuel-reprocessing-47415985/

US senators urge Biden admin to not fund nuclear fuel reprocessing

July 18, 2024 at 03:39 pm EDT
 

WASHINGTON, July 18 (Reuters) - Two Democratic U.S. senators have urged the administration of President Joe Biden to not fund proposals for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, saying such plants produce weapons-usable nuclear material and could encourage other countries to fund them abroad.

WHAT HAPPENED

Senators Jeff Merkley and Edward Markey, both Democrats, said in a letter dated Wednesday that reprocessing plants violate U.S. nuclear security policy which states that civil nuclear research and development must focus on approaches that avoid producing and accumulating weapons-usable nuclear material. They sent the letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Christopher Hanson.

 

WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

Many nonproliferation experts oppose reprocessing because they say its supply chain could be a target for militants seeking to seize plutonium and other materials for use in a crude nuclear bomb.

Former President Gerald Ford halted reprocessing in 1976, citing proliferation concerns. Former President Ronald Reagan lifted a moratorium in 1981, but high costs and security concerns have prevented plants from opening.

The lawmakers, co-chairs of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group, did not name any projects. But ARPA-E, a Department of Energy agency, is funding reprocessing projects.

The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Granholm said when the ARPA-E funding was announced that recycling nuclear waste "can significantly reduce the amount of spent fuel at nuclear sites, and increase economic stability for the communities leading this important work."

ARPA-E has said concerns about proliferation related to the handling of dangerous nuclear materials during reprocessing are "precisely the challenges" the program aims to address.

KEY QUOTE

"The reprocessing of plutonium that would be undertaken at these plants would create security and proliferation risks that far outweigh any ostensible energy benefits," the senators said in the letter. "Furthermore, such projects would be vulnerable to attacks by nefarious actors who seek to exploit the infrastructure and nuclear fuel at these plants to threaten U.S. nationals and interests." (Reporting by Timothy Gardner Editing by Marguerita Choy) 

Nuclear industry faces acute cybersecurity threats – report

https://www.power-technology.com/news/nuclear-industry-faces-menacing-cyber-security-threats-according-to-chatham-house/?cf-view

Nuclear industry faces acute cybersecurity threats – report

Think tank Chatham House claims that the global nuclear industry has to take measures to ease cybersecurity concerns.

Alfie ShawJuly 19, 2024

Sellafield nuclear power plant (NPP) has experienced cybersecurity issues. Credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

As nuclear power establishes itself as an ever more important source of energy for nations across the world, cybersecurity risks are also becoming increasingly menacing, according to a new report by UK think tank Chatham House.

The Sellafield NPP debacle was a conspicuous case of nuclear cybersecurity going awry.

The site on the English coast has been hacked multiple times by actors with close ties to Russia and China since 2015 but this was “consistently covered up by senior staff”, the Guardian reported last December.

According to the Guardian, information and data on Sellafield’s most sensitive activities could have been fed back to foreign parties through “sleeper malware” that has lurked in the background of its computer systems for as long as ten years.

While Sellafield is used primarily as a nuclear waste and decommissioning site, rather than for active nuclear production, the site has the world’s largest stores of plutonium, a highly reactive metal used to make nuclear weapons. It also contains a set of emergency planning documents that detail the steps the UK Government would take should the country come under foreign attack, meaning foreign hackers could have accessed the “highest echelons of confidential material at the site”.

See Also:

• First Solar opens R&D innovation centre in Ohio, US 
• South Korea’s KHNP selected to build Czech nuclear power plant 

The case therefore illustrated how not only energy security, but national security can be comprised by nuclear cybersecurity threats.

According to Chatham House’s ‘Cybersecurity of the civil nuclear sector’ report, there are several reasons the nuclear power industry is particularly vulnerable to cybersecurity breaches.

An unprepared and oblivious industry

Firstly, a lot of the existing nuclear power infrastructure is dated and does not possess up-to-date cybersecurity technology.

Chatham House notes that, currently, many nuclear plants rely on software that is “built on insecure foundations and requiring frequent patches or updates” or “has reached the end of its supported lifespan and can no longer be updated”.  The think tank pointed out that civil nuclear industries are thus playing catch up with other critical national infrastructure (CNI) industries when it comes to cybersecurity.

The fact that nuclear infrastructure is considered to be CNI also makes it an attractive target for hackers. As demonstrated by the Sellafield incident, nuclear sites can have implications beyond energy, including national security. Foreign actors could target another state’s nuclear industry to not only jeopardise the state’s energy security but also gain a military advantage, says Chatham House.

Another vulnerability highlighted by the report is the industry’s reliance on ‘security by obscurity’. Hubristic systems managers have often neglected adequate security measures due to the assumption that ICT (information and communication technology) systems in older NPPs are too small-scale to have well-known vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

The SMR threat

The Chatham House report also details how the uptake of small modular reactors (SMRs) could lead to increased cybersecurity risks. 

Due to their diminutive size, SMRs can be deployed in disparate areas that lack the physical conditions necessary for the deployment of large-scale energy infrastructure. The inherent versatility of the advanced technology has made it popular among governments across the world as they seek to widen access to more forms of renewable energy.

However, SMR-centred nuclear infrastructure would look different to that of traditional reactors, requiring different security measures.

For one, there will be a larger number of SMRs in more locations due to their easily deployable nature. It might not be practical to have staff at each site, with operators instead opting to run the facility by a central computer system without human presence. Increased reliance on cloud systems to run infrastructure is bound to enhance the cybersecurity risks, Chatham House says.

Furthermore, SMRs present additional supply chain pinch-points for cybersecurity, as the materials for SMRs tend to be prefabricated by a larger number of varying suppliers than in traditional nuclear plants, according to Chatham House.

Combination of cyber and physical threats

Chatham House notes that while NPPs are not designed to operate in war zones, they do have several layers of physical safety built in to protect reactors from kinetic threats. However, physical threats combined with cybersecurity breaches could create far more menacing risks for plant operators that could overwhelm operating staff and enable unauthorised access to nuclear materials.

For instance, in Serbia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, this combination of threats was realised at the Vinca research reactor, where research staff feared that highly enriched uranium fuel could be stolen. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was forced to carry out several inspections between 1995 and 1999. The plant was saved, but for some time the threat nearly escalated into catastrophe.

More recently, the Zaporizhzhia NPP has raised similar concerns. Since November 2022, Russia has controlled the NPP, which sits on the front line of Russian-occupied Ukraine. “Reckless attacks” on the power plant have “significantly increased the risk of a major nuclear accident”, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the IAEA, told the UN Security Council in April, although Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of carrying out the attacks.

Where does the industry go from here?

While no single legal regime addresses cyber threats to nuclear infrastructure, international law can provide safeguards against what is often a cross-border threat.

Chatham House recommends that states “develop strategies to both enhance the enforcement of international law in cyberspace and ensure accountability for unlawful cyber operations, including those targeting civil nuclear facilities”. Such strategies could include reforming existing treaties or laws to address cyber-nuclear, establishing an international cybersecurity management strategy and creating national computer emergency response teams specialised in industrial control systems.

With states rushing to grapple with rapaciously evolving cyber technologies, nuclear regulators may have their work cut out safeguarding the digital side of their industry. As the world becomes increasingly digitalised, and more reliant on decentralised, cloud-based systems, it is fair to expect cybersecurity to become a pressing issue for regulators in the near future.

NRC Approves Simplified Mandatory Hearing Procedures for Reactor and Enrichment Licenses

Nuclear Regulatory Commission - News Release
No: 24-059 July 18, 2024
CONTACT: David McIntyre, 301-415-8200

NRC Approves Simplified Mandatory Hearing Procedures for Reactor and Enrichment Licenses

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved simplified procedures for mandatory hearings on licensing decisions for commercial nuclear power plants and uranium enrichment facilities to make the hearings more transparent and efficient. The staff’s proposals, the Commission’s decision, and Commission Voting Records are available on the NRC website under SECY-24-0032.

The changes are effective immediately and will be employed in the mandatory hearing anticipated later this year for the Hermes 2 advanced reactor review. Mandatory hearings, also informally called “uncontested” hearings, for power reactors will involve written materials without oral presentations, with the Commission as presiding officer. Hearings for uranium enrichment facilities will be delegated to the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel with case-specific Commission direction for streamlined procedures.

“As the agency prepares for the potential increase in standardized reactor designs and applications for their deployment, it is important to balance efficiency, clarity, and openness in Commission decision-making,” NRC Chair Christopher T. Hanson wrote in a Feb. 7 memo directing the agency’s Office of the General Counsel to develop proposals for future hearings. “Within the guardrails of our current statutory requirements, I believe significant process efficiencies can be gained.”

The agency is required by law to conduct hearings to determine the sufficiency of the NRC staff’s review before issuing combined licenses, construction permits and early site permits for power reactors, or licenses for construction and operation of uranium enrichment facilities.

The Commission, or the ASLBP designated as “presiding officer,” has conducted 21 mandatory hearings over the past 20 years. These have typically involved oral arguments with witness testimony and extensive written briefs and responses.

24-059.pdf

OH Sup. Ct. decision could make renewables even more difficult

https://energynews.us/2024/07/17/upcoming-ohio-supreme-court-decisions-could-make-it-even-harder-to-develop-solar-power-in-the-state/?utm_medium=email

Upcoming Ohio Supreme Court decisions could make it even harder to develop solar power in the state 

Solar companies appealed two cases in which they say the Ohio Power Siting Board relied on local opposition to decide the projects weren’t in the public interest, rather than weighing all pros and cons.

 by Kathiann M. Kowalski July 17, 2024

A pickup truck pulling a trailer with spools of wire on it drives through a nearly completed solar array.
Crews work on a solar farm near Minster, Ohio, in 2015. Credit: American Renewable Energy and Power

A pair of upcoming decisions by Ohio’s top court could further empower local opponents to block clean energy in what is already one of the hardest states to site new renewable projects. 

 

Two cases before the Ohio Supreme Court ask whether local opposition is enough for the Ohio Power Siting Board to conclude a project is not in the public interest when it otherwise meets all statutory criteria. 

The decisions are expected to guide future regulatory rulings, and clean energy industry and environmental advocates have voiced concerns about the potential impact on energy development.

Most power plants, solar farms and wind farms in Ohio need approval from the Ohio Power Siting Board before they can be built and operated. 

What the law says
State law provides eight criteria for approving new electric generation. They include its impacts on the environment, water conservation, and agricultural land, as well as whether a facility “will serve the interests of electric system economy and reliability” and “the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” 

Solar developers are appealing two recent siting board decisions in which they say regulators took a narrower view of “public interest” than they and courts previously did, effectively changing the legal standard and giving outsized weight to local opposition instead of considering the question with a state-level perspective, they say.

One case deals with the Ohio Power Siting Board’s denial of a permit to construct and operate Lightsource bp’s Birch Solar project roughly 10 miles southwest of Lima. In the other case, the board denied a permit for Vesper Energy to build and operate the Kingwood Solar project in Greene County. 

The developers in both cases made changes to address specific concerns raised by siting board staff or other parties to the cases. In both cases, the board basically ruled that the projects satisfied all criteria except the public interest standard. 

Lawyers for the Ohio Power Siting Board argued its rulings are entitled to a presumption of correctness on review. The board also claimed it used a “broad lens” to weigh the pros and cons of each project and make its factual findings. 

Several local government groups and a local opponents’ group raised similar arguments in support of upholding the siting board decisions. 

“The court should decline Kingwood’s invitation to wade into its own weighing of the evidence in this complex fact-intensive decision,” said one such brief, filed in the Kingwood Solar case by lawyers for the trustees of Miami, Cedarville and Xenia townships along with Jack Van Kley, a lawyer who represented an opponents’ group. Considering local opposition is also properly part of balancing multiple factors to determine the public interest, they wrote.

‘Public opinion is not public interest’
Developers for each project maintained the power siting board erred as a matter of law when it let local opposition override other factors in its determination of the public interest.

In Birch Solar, the board concluded there was “universal opposition from local governments and residents,” and it then held that opposition by local government bodies was “a determining component” of whether the project met the public interest criterion, the developer’s reply brief noted. That approach also violated Ohio’s statutory law and constitution by improperly delegating the board’s legal authority to local governments, the company argued. 

The board also erred by focusing only on the amount of opposition. Rather, the board should have looked at evidence relating to opponents’ objections and considered how permit conditions could address them, the company’s lawyers wrote.

“[T]he Board never even assessed whether there would be any potential negative impacts to the public before deciding that the Project was not in the ‘public interest,’” said a separate brief by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. What matters is the evidence of a project’s impacts, not the quantity of opinions, their brief said.

In a similar vein, the power siting board unlawfully found the opposition of three adjoining townships was “controlling” in the Kingwood Solar case, the developer’s brief said. In other words, the board treated the opposition as determinative of the outcome.

“Public opinion is not public interest,” said Lindsey Workman, community affairs manager for Vesper Energy, the developer for Kingwood Solar. Ohio’s statute does not say local opposition trumps all other interests, such as economic benefits or enhanced reliability for Ohio’s energy infrastructure, she said. “That’s not how the law is written, and that’s not how the law should go.”

A 2021 law known as Senate Bill 52 did give counties the power to ban most new solar and wind projects from various areas. Among other things, the law also gives counties a chance to review new solar and wind projects that aren’t otherwise banned before they get to the power siting board. Both solar projects in the current Supreme Court cases are exempt from those parts of the law, however.

While SB 52 gave local governments “a chance to participate” in the power siting board process, the legal criteria for approval stayed the same, said Chris Tavenor, an attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council, which filed a brief in the Birch Solar case. Yet by treating local opposition as determinative, the board was “creating essentially a political process for those projects to be approved or denied, as opposed to a legal analysis,” he said.

Other briefs in the Birch Solar case underscored that opposition wasn’t universal. One brief came from a group of local solar supporters. Another explained that leaders for Auglaize County and Logan Township took no position on the project after they reached agreement with the developer on some issues.

Other potential impacts
In addition to the possibility that Vesper and Lightsource bp’s projects will be canceled, advocates are worried about the impact on future cases.

The Natural Resources Defense Counsel wrote in its brief that “allowing the Board’s unprecedented and unreasonable decision on Birch Solar to stand will prevent the development of other well-planned renewable energy projects in Ohio.” That would reinforce continued use of fossil fuel generation, which releases greenhouse gases that drive human-caused climate change, as well as other pollution.

The natural gas industry also has a stake in the outcome, because the cases could open the door for local opposition to block power plants, pipelines and other infrastructure. 

The Ohio Independent Power Producers’ brief in each case said the power siting board’s ruling “erodes a fair and predictable permitting process upon which new investment in power generating facilities in Ohio relies.” The Ohio Chamber of Commerce’s briefs also voiced a fear that the boards’ rulings inject “undue uncertainty into Ohio’s historically stable and predictable regulatory framework for building in-state power generation.”

The Ohio Supreme Court has yet to schedule oral argument in each case. It would likely take several months after that for that court to issue its decisions.