The mishap at the Three Mile Island generating plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is but the latest spur to an intensifying national debate over the merits of nuclear power. In an attempt to gain greater control over their nuclear destinies, a number of states and municipalities have enacted statutes within the last five years which impose a variety of limitations and conditions on the siting of new nuclear reactors within their borders. The central legal issue raised by these measures is the extent to which the federal laws governing nuclear development have preempted state and local regulatory authority.

Federal preemption is a fundamental and recurrent issue in environmental law, but there has been relatively little judicial definition of its precise contours in the nuclear context. While a considerable volume of legal commentary has grappled with the extent of the Atomic Energy Act's preemption of state and local nuclear regulatory statutes,¹ the case law assessing the validity of these measures is sparse. Two federal district courts recently broke this judicial quiescence, however, with decisions striking down a New York City ordinance requiring a permit for operating a reactor in the city and a California statute hinging state certification of proposed nuclear plants on the existence and federal approval of a technology for long-term nuclear waste disposal.