The Council of State Governments has posted a two-part series of on-demand webinars exploring the status of nuclear waste management in the United States, with a focus on how the lack of a disposal facility affects electricity customers, the communities that are home to nuclear power plants, and the utilities that own and operate the plants.

Both parts of the series are available on the Council’s website. Part one is here.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 established a national program for the safe, permanent disposal of highly radioactive waste. In 2002, Congress approved a site at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain; however, that project was stalled and defunded in 2010. Consequently, there currently is no disposal facility in the United States for spent fuel rods from 99 operating commercial nuclear reactors across the country.

Watch the on-demand webinars.

Image by Ron Mader | Planeta

At the Big Law Business Summit last week, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman ripped into Exxon Mobil for its stance on climate change, reports Bloomberg.

The report says Schneiderman accused Exxon of glossing over the risks that climate change poses to its core businesses in its public securities statements, and then couching its disclosure as first amendment protected.

“The first amendment doesn’t protect fraud – it doesn’t protect fraudulent speech,” he said.

Seventeen state attorneys general are investigating whether fossil fuel companies mislead investors in public disclosures about the risks associated with climate change.

Read the article.

A coalition of U.S. state attorneys general received guidance from well-known climate scientists and environmental lawyers in March as some of them opened investigations into Exxon Mobil for allegedly misleading the public about climate change risks, documents seen by Reuters showed, Reuters is reporting.

The report says Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has urged action on climate change, and Matt Pawa, who litigated against Exxon in a global warming case, were listed as presenters at a March 29 meeting of more than a dozen state prosecutors. That information came from emails between the offices of attorneys general in New York and Vermont.

Environmental groups are pushing in court, at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and in the offices of pension funds to demand more accountability on climate issues from big oil companies,” the report says.

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Twenty-four states are suing to block the Obama administration from implementing its new clean power regulations — the cornerstone of a promise that the United States will reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming, but some Texas energy companies are not as unanimous in their opposition. That’s because Texas’ energy sector is transforming rapidly, reports Mose Buchele for NPR.

“We really see what we are promoting as a very Texas way to do this,” says Brett Kerr, a lobbyist and spokesperson for Houston-based Calpine Energy, the largest independent power producer in the country. Kerr says Calpine consumes 15 percent of the gas produced in Texas.

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The rise of local bans on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” by local governments has sparked a recent backlash in carbon-producing states, writes Kristen Van de Biezenbos of Texas Tech University School of Law in an article posted on the Social Science Research Network.

“In 2015, Texas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina passed laws that forbid any city, town, or other municipal body from banning fracking or passing certain regulations on the practice, by popular vote or otherwise. Other states are likely to follow suit,” she writes.

In an abstract, she says her article is the first to propose that cities and towns in those states could incorporate and enforce existing state environmental laws. “By doing so, those municipalities may be able to ensure compliance with those environmental regulations by oil and gas companies and minimize some of the environmental harms associated with fracking, even when they cannot enact outright bans on the practice. Further, this Article explains why the incorporation and enforcement of state environmental laws by cities and towns — and particularly cities and towns in states that have taken away local power to enact fracking bans — should not be expressly or impliedly preempted by those laws. Indeed, taking this approach would also further important policy goals inherent in federalism and help restore voter confidence in the democratic process.”

Read the article.