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Halliburton Energy Services, Inc., is one of the corporations from which the United States seeks to recover the response costs that it incurred due to releases and threatened releases of hazardous substances into the environment from facilities where radioactive materials were manufactured, repaired, reworked, stored, and processed for disposal. GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences Corp. and Pengo Industries, Inc., are among the other defendants in United States of America v. Halliburton Energy Services, Inc., (case number 4:07-cv-03795 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas). The federal government, which filed the lawsuit in 2007, alleges that the defendants are liable under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, commonly known as CERCLA, for more than $26.7 million in unreimbursed response costs for the cleanup of sites in Houston, Webster, and Odessa. The State of Texas intervened in the case to recover the response costs that it had contributed to the federal government.

"Much like Captain Renault in Casablanca, the White House is suddenly shocked, shocked to find that oil rigs can explode, destroying ecosystems and livelihoods. The Obama administration has backed away from its offshore oil expansion policy in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe as the long-term environmental and economical consequences unfold in the Gulf States. Headlines are clamoring for the criminal investigations of BP, TransOcean, Halliburton and ultimately, the federal regulator, Mineral Management Services (MMS). Rather paradoxically, President Obama is using the oil spill to call for more nuclear power. Yet, with the exception of a handful of insightful political cartoonists, the obvious parallel between the regulatory delinquency of MMS and that of its nuclear equivalent - the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) - and the potential for an equally catastrophic accident in the nuclear sector, has not been drawn. As with the MMS debacle, the NRC is gambling with inevitable disaster with the same spin of the wheel of misfortune and with potentially even higher stakes. "