Nuclear Energy Institute

We’re not going to say the cat’s out of the bag or anything like that, be we were surprised to read this in the Wall Street Journal, with the paper’s Robert Thompson listening to Energy Secretary Steven Chu: Well, it's fair to say that the whole history of Yucca Mountain was more political than scientific. But also very truthfully I can say that given what we know today, the repository looks less...

Nuclear Power Pants , a band from Baltimore, MD, has a uniquely awful video up on YouTube that might best be described as GWAR meets Ed Wood . (That's one heckuva high bar for this high camp.) Enjoy. Can the nuclear energy industry sue for defamation of character? Read More...

Further to David’s post below, we thought we’d feature our old friends at FOE, that is, Friends of the Earth, using that discredited several year old default figure to gin up fear over loan guarantees. Frankly, the idea - to link them to bank bailouts - is a good way to make something rather abstract to the public seem really sinister – not to mention the use of music that seems to come from The Shining...

That question reverberated through a couple of hearings about the  Department of Energy’s 2011 budget request and, up to now, has not received a very adequate answer. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has took a stab at it this week. At the House Science and Natural Resources committee yesterday and at the Senate Appropriate Committee’s Energy and Water subcommittee today, Chu faced some pretty insistent...

The Congressional Budget Office’s Director, Douglas Elmendorf , provided some important insight into how loan guarantees are assessed in the US government’s budget . For those who have been following the 50 percent default rate argument that nuclear critics have been making , CBO makes clear that the assumption of the rate in their 2003 report was for a piece of legislation that was never enacted....

The Washington Post tried a front page story about nuclear energy – and if you develop a higher profile, as nuclear energy has done, then newspapers are going to take a closer look at you. We expect that and in truth the story isn’t bad. For nuclear energy followers, the news isn’t very new at all: In states such as Georgia, Florida and South Carolina, utilities have won permission to charge customers...

We published a sour editorial the other day from Australia to show we had to go down under for a negative view of our loan guarantee. But let’s not sell Australia short – we’ve run enough material over the last couple of years to show the country is grappling seriously with ending its long standing ban against nuclear energy. Our experience is that once the conversation gets going, it’s hard to imagine...

We generally have no beef with the lobbying class, whether on the federal or state level. Legislators have to deal with a tremendous number of complex issues and lobbyists are one way (admittedly among many ways) to get up to speed on an issue. Politicians are not morons: they know NEI prefers nuclear energy solutions, that Microsoft does not promote WordPerfect and that Sierra Club makes the best...

The internet can be a bit, shall we say, free wheeling, so Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s Facebook page often finds itself awash in ill-considered comment. Or is it so ill-considered? Case in point: [Energy Secretary Steven] Chu posted information about $8 billion in loan guarantees awarded to two new nuclear reactors. The announcement spurred his “fans” to make more than 93 comments on nuclear energy...

Looking around for software that helps greenify your life, we ran across this . Announced Monday, one of IBM's new partnerships is with Johnson Controls, a manufacturer of products that optimize energy use in buildings. The two plan to combine Johnson's energy-efficient technologies with IBM's Tivoli software to offer customers a way to monitor and manage power usage, which IBM believes...

Here’s a story we certainly had no reason to expect: The United Arab Emirates said Monday it had appointed former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix as the head of a new nuclear advisory board of experts. The nine-member advisory board will meet twice a year starting this February and will help the Persian Gulf state develop nuclear energy, the official WAM news agency reports, citing...

The two big posts everyone was raving about over the weekend come from Depleted Cranium’s Steve Packard and Brave New Climate’s Barry Brook. Steve clearly spent a great deal of man-hours providing a number of reasons Why You Can’t Build a Bomb From Spent Fuel . As well, Barry Brook always gets a heavy conversation going, this time by asking if climate sceptics and anti-nukes matter . There’s also been...

With a vote by the state Senate on the future of Vermont Yankee scheduled for this Wednesday , residents of the Green Mountain State have seen a steady increase in advertising campaigns about the plant. This print ad from the IBEW Local 300 , and signed by 13 labor unions, has been running in newspapers for the last week. The copy: This week the state Senate may vote on whether to prematurely close...

Rasmussen Reports has released a new poll on nuclear energy in the wake of President Obama’s loan guarantee announcement. Bottom line: 49% of Americans favor the building of new nuclear power plants. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are opposed to the idea, and 24% are not sure. We’ve seen better, but given the mood of the country in general – or at least Rasmussen’s read of it – we’re not terribly surprised...

In what we might call a bid for equal time, we roamed around looking for some stories that took a more critical view of the Vogtle loan guarantees. It must have been irresistible to The New York Times to see how environmentalists reacted and turned up, among others, our favorite group for reliable nuclear trash talk : Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, whose political arm endorsed Mr. Obama...