[decomm_wkg] Supreme Court declines to hear case involving St. Louis contamination. "The companies had asked the Supreme Court to review whether federal nuclear safety regulations preempt state tort standards of care in public liability actions."

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Supreme Court declines to hear case involving St. Louis contamination

17h agoNuclear News

The Supreme Court of the United States on Monday declined to hear an appeal from General Atomics subsidiary Cotter Corporation and Commonwealth Edison, an Exelon company, in a case over alleged radioactive contamination in the St. Louis, Mo., area, leaving in place an 8th Circuit Court ruling that allows the plaintiffs’ state-law tort claims to proceed under the federal Price-Anderson Act.

The denial came in Cotter Corporation, et al. v. Nikki Steiner Mazzocchio, et al., docket no. 24-1001, according to the court’s May 18 orders list and docket. The justices did not explain their decision, as is typical in certiorari denials.

The case: The dispute stems from claims by Nikki Steiner Mazzocchio and Angela Steiner Kraus, who allege that exposure to radioactive waste tied to sites near Coldwater Creek caused them to develop cancer. In an October 2024 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit affirmed a lower court order declining to dismiss their claims against entities that allegedly handled the waste over the years, including Cotter Corp. and Commonwealth Edison, along with DJR Holdings and the St. Louis Airport Authority.

The companies had asked the Supreme Court to review whether federal nuclear safety regulations preempt state tort standards of care in public liability actions. The 8th Circuit said they do not, concluding that state tort law can still supply the applicable standard in this context. By denying review, the Supreme Court left that ruling intact, allowing the litigation to continue in the lower courts.

Background: Beginning in 1946, residues and wastes from Mallinckrodt’s St. Louis uranium processing facility in downtown St. Louis were improperly stored on property near the St. Louis airport and another site near Coldwater Creek. The bulk of the waste, which consisted of low-level radioactive contamination commingled with metals from uranium processing activities, was removed in the past, but residual contamination lingers.

A 2025 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association claimed to have found an increased rate of cancer for people who grew up living close to Coldwater Creek. The study based its analysis on a cohort of more than 4,200 people who participated in the St. Louis Baby Tooth–Later Life Health Study. From 1958 to 1970, individuals in that study donated their baby teeth to assess exposure to atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

Since the 1990s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been cleaning up the creek and surrounding areas under the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program.

PJM gets emergency approval to curtail data centers, large loads during hot weather

Under the Department of Energy order, the PJM Interconnection can curtail power to data centers with backup generation as a last resort before instituting rolling blackouts.

Published May 19, 2026


Ethan Howland
Senior Reporter

An Amazon Web Services data center in Stone Ridge, Va. The PJM Interconnection will be able to curtail data centers and other large loads that have backup generation under an emergency order issued May 18, 2026, by the U.S. Department of Energy. Nathan Howard via Getty Images

Dive Brief:

• The PJM Interconnection can curtail data centers and other large loads that have backup generation under an emergency order issued Monday by the U.S. Department of Energy.
• PJM on Sunday asked to be able to direct transmission owners and electric utilities in its Mid-Atlantic and Midwest footprint for permission to curtail those facilities if needed for three days starting May 18 because of hot weather combined with planned power plant maintenance outages.
• PJM said it expected to have less than 5,800 MW of reserves during its May 18 peak, and that Maryland and Virginia could be especially stressed by the unseasonably hot weather.
  

Dive Insight:

Power plant and transmission owners often take their facilities offline in the spring for maintenance so they are prepared for the summer, PJM noted. The grid operator said it expected power plants totaling more than 40 GW would be offline for planned outages on May 18.

“The projected level of generation outages coupled with the forecasted demand raises a significant risk of emergency conditions that could jeopardize electric reliability and public safety,” PJM said.

The curtailments would be a last resort before ordering rolling blackouts, according to the DOE’s order, issued under the Federal Power Act’s section 202(c). Only large energy consumers with backup generation would be affected.

“The employment of this backup generation is expected to reduce stress on the grid,” the DOE said. “This will permit orderly, safe, and secure operations during PJM’s hot weather conditions.”

There are significant amounts of backup generation in the United States that have remained largely untapped during grid emergencies, according to the DOE.

“Deployment of backup generation resources (whether auxiliary, standby, directly-connected, battery storage or other, and whether synchronized or not to the bulk power system) at data centers (including, but not limited to, hyperscaler facilities), and at other large load industrial and commercial customer sites, can prevent avoidable blackouts, thereby saving lives and reducing costs to the American people,” the department said.

In January, the DOE issued similar emergency orders to PJM, Duke Energy Carolinas and Duke Energy Progress, and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

PJM said on Monday that it had issued “maximum generation” and “load management” alerts for May 19, with a “hot weather” alert in place for most of the PJM footprint.

Also, the grid operator activated demand response customers in parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Dominion regions. The grid operator said it called on pre-emergency demand response for the Baltimore Gas and Electric, Dominion and Potomac Electric Power Co. areas on Monday to address local transmission constraints and to preserve the run-time of generators that will be needed for the hot weather and higher electricity demand expected on Tuesday and Wednesday.

For three days starting on Tuesday, PJM expected its peak load to hit 134,027 MW, 135,961 MW and 119,103 MW.

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Mid-sized solar could help bring down electricity bills in Pennsylvania

Distributed solar developers say they could build gigawatts of projects to help ease the state’s power crunch — if lawmakers and regulators set clear rules.

By Jeff St. John
13 May 2026

A distributed solar system on the roof of a warehouse owned by EQT Real Estate in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania (Black Bear Energy)

Pennsylvania needs more energy. Data centers are pushing demand skyward, utilities can’t build new capacity fast enough, and electric bills are on the rise. Medium-sized solar installations — smaller than utility-scale farms but larger than home rooftop arrays — could help ease the pressure.

But state lawmakers, utilities, regulators, and solar developers are tussling over the rules that govern such installations, and it’s unclear whether new legislation to resolve their disputes will be passed this year. That worries Victoria Stulgis, president of Black Bear Energy.

Last month, her company and its partners celebrated the energization of 4.9 megawatts of solar on the roofs of two warehouses owned by EQT Real Estate in Mountain Top, Pennsylvania. The two projects, developed by Sigma Renewables and Scale Microgrids and managed by Black Bear Energy, are among roughly 2,100mid-sized generation projects being planned in the state, most of them distributed solar.

What makes these projects possible is Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act, a 2004 law allowing medium-sized projects that generate power with a range of technologies, from solar and wind to waste biomass and coal-bed methane, to earn a relatively high rate for the energy they feed to the grid.

After years of battling with utilities, solar developers won a 2021 decision from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that laid the groundwork for a rapid expansion of mid-sized projects throughout the state.

But in the past few years, Pennsylvania utilities have cast a pall over that growth with a series of actions that could curtail the revenues these projects can earn, Stulgis said.

“Developers and institutional property owners have invested significant time and capital to develop these solar projects,” she said. Black Bear Energy has completed 15 megawatts of projects, has 22 more megawatts under construction, and has secured interconnection rights for another 106 megawatts across 34 projects, she said.

“Changing those rules midstream would undermine confidence and create real risk for projects already in development,” she said. ​“Some developers are still leaning in, believing there may be a viable path forward, while others are walking away from shovel-ready projects because of the uncertainty.”

Unlike neighboring states such as Maryland, New Jersey, and New York, Pennsylvania hasn’t adopted a program to enable community solar. Such projects are designed to provide enough revenue to spur third-party developers to build mid-sized solar arrays, to which utility customers can subscribe to lower their bills.

Instead, solar projects of up to 3 megawatts in Pennsylvania are compensated through net metering, a system that’s more commonly used with residential rooftop solar and other small-scale installations. The projects earn a close-to-retail rate for power they send to the grid, notably more than the wholesale rate that larger projects earn.

Solar developers argue that the existing rules allow businesses, school districts, public agencies, and farms to offset rapidly rising electricity costs by hosting solar projects. But utilities argue that paying close to retail rates for electricity from these arrays forces them to raise rates on the rest of their customer base — a version of the cost-shift argument that has dogged battles over rooftop solar net-metering programs over the past two decades.

The Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission supports the utilities’ cost-shift argument. In March testimony before the state’s House Energy Committee, PUCChair Stephen DeFrank said that costs from distributed generation projects moving through the interconnection process are projected to exceed $90 million per year by 2027, and could reach $700 million per year if the more than 2,100 projects seeking to be built ​“proceed under existing rules.”

If utilities aren’t able to recover those costs, they’ll have to increase other rates, he said. Those increases will be ​“first borne by commercial and industrial customers, including small businesses operating on narrow margins,” he said.

The argument for adding solar to lower utility bills

Advocates of distributed solar are pushing back against this cost-shift argument. Rather than increasing everyone’s utility bills, distributed solar will lower utility costs at large, they say, by bringing much-needed new clean generation to a state facing increasing electricity costs driven by the data center boom.

Those are the findings of an April report by Aurora Energy Research commissioned by community-solar developer Dimension Energy. The report analyzed whether building 2 gigawatts of distributed solar by 2030, a number that’s in line with current market growth, would reduce demand for power across the low-voltage distribution grids they’re connected to.

Aurora found that additional solar power could generate a total savings of $1.7billion over the next 20 years, compared with a scenario under which it wasn’t built. Utilities would still need to pay those projects about $780 million over that time. But that would leave just under $1 billion in net savings that could be applied toward lowering utility customers’ energy bills.

“There are multiple mechanisms by which distributed solar can reduce costs,” said Zachary Edelen, a senior associate at Aurora.

For example, there is the roughly $1.2 billion over 20 years that Pennsylvania utilities could save in decreasing ​“capacity procurement obligations,” the costs they pay for resources to keep the grid running when demand for electricity peaks, he said. That change could make a substantial difference in Pennsylvania, which is part of PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving 13 states and Washington, D.C.

PJM’s skyrocketing capacity costs have been a major factor in pushing up utility rates between 12% and 26% for customers of the state’s major utilities from December 2024 to December 2025. That has driven politicians including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) to demand reforms from both PJM and the state’s utilities.

Utah ranchers are finding relief by ‘farming solar’ Important according to Google magic Click to teach Gmail this conversation is not important

On a hillside in Mona, visible from Interstate 15, a solar farm with more than 200,000 panels generates about 80 megawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 25,000 homes.

During growing season, more than 500 sheep graze under and around the panels to maintain the vegetation.

The Clover Creek solar project, which became operational in 2021, has already generated over $1.03 million in property tax revenue — about half of which went to the Juab School District.

Over its 20-year lifespan, the project is expected to make $5.7 million.

“We couldn’t even come close to having the same income doing anything else in agriculture as we’re making producing power.”

As costs rise, some Utah ranchers are finding relief by ‘farming solar’
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