May, 2008

Ralph Nader and some Greenpeace activists showed up yesterday outside our offices to shout slogans and wave signs - well, not Nader himself, but his crew. As you may know, Washington is the go-to stop on Amtrak when you have a sign and a slogan, so the lunchtime crowd is very used to this happening pretty...

sc_project=618519; sc_invisible=0; sc_partition=3; sc_security="1d01941b"; ...read more

Here's a summary of what went on in the energy markets last week: Electricity peak prices decreased $1-24/MWh at all hubs except for Entergy. PJM West fell to $64/MWh, the lowest price it’s been over the past four months, due to moderate temperatures. Entergy prices increased to $83/MWh, the highest...

In yet another sign that Lieberman-Warner is DOA, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has announced that he will not be present when the Senate begins debate on the Lieberman Warner Climate Security Act next week. From The Washington Post , In a press conference late Wednesday afternoon, McCain said he did not support...

Local news reporter straight out of central casting ( Jon Delano ) aside, a nice piece about Westinghouse ran on Pittsburgh's KDKA last night. (Video is available here .) With orders for six new plants in the U.S. and four in China,the folks at Westinghouse have sure been busy. ...read more

We bow to no one in our respect for Ralph Nader and the work he has done to expose government and corporate corruption and to work always for his fellow citizens. By extension, he has done good work for many other people throughout the world by inspiring them to look closely at their own institutions...

SCANA ( SCG ) subsidiary, South Carolina Electric & Gas , announced Tuesday that they had reached a contractual agreement with Westinghouse and the Shaw Group ( SGR ) to design and build two 1,117-megawatt nuclear power plants at the Virgil C. Summer Station near Jenkinsville, SC. The AP 1000 reactors...

Glenn Compton, chairman of ManaSota-88 , a regional environmental  group (the region being Florida), writes in the Sarasota Herald Tribune about the utter terribleness of nuclear energy. Now, it's not really fun or enlightening to find these little screeds and promote them to you, because the...

After you've read the John McCain quote in the post below, you may  wonder if, by proposing to put used nuclear fuel, including that of the United States, into some kind of international repository, he is falling prey to the worst NIMBY argument imaginable or acknowledging that other countries...

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has just completed delivering a major foreign policy speech on Nuclear Security at the University of Denver. (The full transcript is available here .) I found this quote especially interesting, I would seek to establish an international repository for spent nuclear fuel that could...

Even if we were a little more, um, self-centered, we probably  wouldn't try out a sentence like this : Nuclear power rather than renewable sources like the wind or sun are the best option for oil-rich Gulf Arab states to meet growing energy demands, especially if produced collectively, say regional...

Over at the City Journal , Max Schulz - a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and director of its Center for Energy Policy and the Environment - wrote a brilliant summary on California's myopic energy policies. Below are some of the many highlights. I encourage everyone to read the whole thing...

Be sure to check out Mr. Barton's blog . "One of the roles of educated people in society is to help other people overcome irrational fears. That role is certainly not to manipulate those fears to further irrational personal and group agendas." - Charles Barton ...read more

David Walters stirred up the debate with Charles Barton by discussing California's wind energy problems while adding in the benefits of nuclear plants. NNadir wrote A Comment On Whether Nuclear Energy Can Save Your Pathetic Butt in which tinhat7 wrote back saying he doesn't think so. Unfortunately...

According to Energy Secretary Bodman, it looks like the DOE is still on track to submit Yucca's license application to the NRC early next month . ...read more

In a move meant to bring an end to being the world's biggest net importer of electricity, the Italian government today announced that they will begin building nuclear power plants by 2013. The decision is a reversal of a 1987 referendum , banning the use of nuclear power in the country. From The...

Here's a summary of what went on in the energy markets last week: Electricity peak prices at the Western hubs increased $3-23/MWh and decreased $6-57/MWh at the Eastern hubs. According to Platt’s Electric Power Daily (5/16/08), ERCOT has seen “its share of volatility in recent months” due to “an...

Here's a summary of U.S. nuclear plant performances last month: For April 2008, the average net capacity factor was 79.0 percent. This figure is 0.3 percentage points lower than April 2007. Monthly nuclear generation was 57.1 billion kilowatt-hours in April 2008, lower than the 57.3 bkWh in April...

From the World Nuclear News : Japan's Toshiba Corporation expects orders for at least 33 nuclear power reactors by 2015, and plans to expand all its nuclear businesses over the period to 2020, according to the company's president. The predictions were made earlier this month in Strategies for...

Sen. Barbara Boxer's (D-CA) much-anticipated " Boxer substitute " to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act has just been released (sub. req'd). To no one's surprise, the nuclear industry does not get much play. However, according to Congress Daily 's Darren Goode , Senator...

It does sometimes seem as though we have a scoreboard around here to tote up the countries that are warming up (or rewarming up) to nuclear energy. Obviously, concerns over CO 2 emissions and nuclear energy's avoidance of them is the biggest motivator. The ability to scale up seems to be a factor...

One of the scarier things one can contemplate happening is being  irradiated, and anything so scary is going to be riven with taboo and fear-driven misinformation - popular culture, never shy to amping up fear, shows victims being baked from the inside, developing ghastly sores, rapidly sickening...

From Pennsylvania's Business Journal : Exelon Corp. agreed to help a nuclear watchdog group keep tabs on Three Mile Island for the next five years. The agreement was reached with EFMR Monitoring Group , which is led by nuclear activist Eric Epstein. Under the deal, Epstein agreed not to file legal...

Wired magazine marks its 15-year anniversary with the cover story, " Inconvenient Truths: Cutting Carbon Is the Only Thing That Matters ." In a sidebar titled " 10 Green Heresies ," contributing editor Spencer Reiss writes, There's no question that nuclear power is the most climate...

It's a synchronicity kind of thing: Just as Vietnam revs up its interest  in nuclear energy, here come the Russians, continuing to lumber around their neighborhood looking for partners : Valeri Rachkov, Director of Rosatom’s Scientific Policy Department, said during the International Nuclear...