February, 2010

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

How has the editorial response to President Barack Obama’s announcement of loan guarantees been? Good – really good . Now, let’s acknowledge just for fun that the ink stained wretches of the fourth estate – now byte stained wretches too – remain far more relevant to policy discussion than falling circulation...

So how did Barack Obama’s announcement of the first loan guarantee go with the nabobs of the media world? Well – really well. But let’s do some grousing and correcting anyway, since we think some media outlets are looking for a hook for the story that the facts on the ground do not fully support. For...

Last night, ABC's World News with Diane Sawyer led the broadcast with a 3-minute " A Nuclear America: The President is Promoting Nuclear Energy as the Country's Future " describing yesterday's presidential announcement of a partial guarantee on loans that Southern Company and its...

Here’s an interesting update to a post at Mother Jones on nuclear’s supposed 50% default rate : Stephanie Mueller, Press Secretary for the Department of Energy, sent this response on Tuesday evening: "This [the CBO report] is a 7 year old analysis of legislation that was never enacted, and it is...

This morning NEI’s VP Alex Flint debated Kevin Kamps (pdf) from Beyond Nuclear for about 45 minutes. Besides disagreeing with every issue Mr. Kamps raised, I have to say he was quite smooth with his responses and did an effective job at making his case. But as Mr. Flint pointed out at 42:50, many of...

We’ve been discussing loan guarantees for what now seems like years – about five of them in fact, as they were established as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, though guarantees specifically for nuclear energy came along a couple of years later – so it’s about time that we saw a few of them. Here...

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who is ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources committee gave a speech on the Senate floor the other day: Let’s start with nuclear energy.  During his remarks two weeks ago, the President indicated his support for a “new generation of safe, clean nuclear...

This comment from President Barack Obama struck us as a little odd: He said Congress needs to pass a bill that includes Republican preferences such as incentives for nuclear energy and "clean coal" technology, as well as Democratic proposals for incentives to develop alternative energy sources...

The other day, we listened to the hearings for the NRC commissioners - there are three open slots - but did not follow up with the TVA candidates later that afternoon. Maybe we should have : During the hearing, each of the nominees gave a statement and was questioned by the committee members about their...

Besides last week being a busy week on budget proposals, loan guarantees, etc., there was quite a bit of discussion on the Vermont Yankee tritium issue. And Meredith Angwin at Yes Vermont Yankee has done an exquisite job of keeping up with all of the media reports and facts that are coming out . As she...

Enough about the DOE budget, the blue ribbon commission and government stuff! – for today anyway. --- We weren’t quite sure what this meant : On Wednesday the U.S ambassador met with Energy Minister Taner Yildiz to express the desire of U.S. firms to build Turkey's first nuclear power station. Government...

The Republicans in Congress have put together their own budget plan for nuclear energy for 2011. Here’s what they don’t like about the Obama administration’s plan: Terminating Yucca Application:  Yucca is still by law the nation's solution for spent nuclear fuel, and the President's budget...

Last night, our CEO Marv Fertel discussed a number of nuclear topics with Clean Skies TV's Tyler Suiters . Several of the topics mentioned include loan guarantees, a Clean Energy Deployment Administration , and decreasing from 10 years to 6 years the time it takes to get a plant online through regulatory...

Here’s a novel suggestion from Stephen Bainbridge: President Obama has a ready source of nuclear knowledge in the government that could turn its attention to the industrial sector: The Navy already operates dozens of small nuclear reactors in aircraft carriers and submarines, with an outstanding record...

Since the President’s support for nuclear was made clear at the State of the Union, our nuclear critics have dramatically ramped up their opposition to nuclear, particularly on loan guarantees. Besides continuously repeating the debunked 50 percent default rate for nuclear , one detail often neglected...

Or the nuclear elements thereof, anyway. This was written for NEI’s member newsletter, Nuclear Energy Overview, and provides a fairly thorough overview of the nuclear elements of this year’s budget request. This is just the beginning of the annual process, with the House and Senate due to hold many hearings...

The Department of Energy’s 2011 budget request is excellent in recognizing the value of nuclear energy, mostly by simply shifting sums around to favor research a little more and increasing the loan guarantee authority to ensure more plants can be built. We’ll have more details about the budget request...

Last night, seven of us had the opportunity to chat amongst ourselves about President Obama’s State of the Union , the announcement of a blue-ribbon commission , the proposal to increase loan guarantees and Vermont Yankee’s tritium quagmire . Last week was quite an eventful week for the nuclear industry...