Media Coverage
Source: Bloomberg BNA
Media Coverage
04.09.13
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that the federal government cannot invoke the ‘‘unavoidable delays’’ clause in its nuclear waste disposal contracts with nuclear utilities to avoid paying damages for its failure to accept, transport, and dispose of nuclear waste by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act’s (NWPA) January 31, 1998 deadline.
Jay Silberg, a Washington, D.C.-based partner in Pillsbury’s nuclear energy practice, represented energy company Entergy before the court.
Silberg spoke to the Bloomberg BNA about the various cases that are still pending against the government. While the Entergy case made it clear that the government “can’t use the unavoidable delays defense anymore,” he suggested that the effect of this case may be somewhat limited in that all utilities will still “separately have to prove damages,” for example, causal connection and amount.
He noted that the utilities continue to pay under the NWPA—to the tune of approximately $750 million per year—despite the government’s breach. According to Silberg, the reasons for this were two-fold: if the utilities stop paying under the act their licenses to run nuclear facilities could “be at risk,” and the utilities want to “keep the government on the hook” to dispose of nuclear waste in the future.