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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...

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...

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...

In his role as Sovereign of Vatican City, the Pope gives a speech to ambassadors each year to indicate the positions the state holds on various topics. In this year’s speech, Pope Benedict made it clear he was unhappy with the result of COP15: Speaking in French, he said he shared "the growing concern...

A bipartisan trio of Senators presented a framework on climate change. The framework is focused on energy security and job creation and is admirably broad based in its energy approach. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) aim to create legislation that can find...

The Los Angeles Times ran an editorial on nuclear energy this past weekend. It’s pretty weak tea. Senate Republicans and many moderate Democrats are seeking to lard up prospective climate and energy bills with billions of dollars in loan guarantees and other subsidies for nuclear power, even though it...

One of the themes – or is that memes – we’ve been following here is the growing support for nuclear energy among Congressional Democrats. We might be expected to consider nuclear energy a post-partisan issue – that is, one where Republicans and Democrats more-or-less agree on its value generally if not...

If you’ve been following the health care or climate change debates, you know that your local newspaper will run a story each day whether or not anything significant happened that day because of the intense interest in the subjects. Some stories can roll on for a good long time before anything resembling...

As opposed to Bob McDonnell above, governor-elect Chris Christie of New Jersey tilts rather away from the national Republican party on energy issues. Might not mean anything: It may just be that he has a genuine desire to move New Jersey to solar energy and will clear away hurdles to make it happen....

President Barack Obama’s energy speech at MIT could have focused a bit more on nuclear energy. But he intended to cover a lot of bases and clearly did that. He noted the green jobs created by the stimulus bill, he called for bipartisanship in crafting the climate change bill in the Senate, he paid appropriate...

If this article about the Czech Republic’s energy profile is correct, the number one goal of the country is to disentangle itself from Russia, with which it was of course deeply entangled for some fifty years. The number two goal, though, is to keep a fishy eye on President Vaclav Klaus, who appears...

Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) co-wrote an op-ed for the New York Times demonstrating that distinguished gentlemen from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum can agree on a few things. Like what, for example? Second, while we invest in renewable energy sources like wind and...

We mentioned in an earlier post that we didn’t think Germany was a notably good locale for solar power. This snap judgment came due to our visits to Germany, where the sun was, at best, a fickle friend. But let Germany’s Economics and Technology Ministry tell you. Maybe we were wrong : The solar industry...

As you may know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has five commissioners. Currently, the count is three: Gregory Jaczko, who chairs, Kristine Svenicki and Dale Klein, the former chairman. Nils Diaz left in 2006 and Peter Lyons earlier this year. Terms run for five years, which keeps electoral politics...

In the annals of bad arguments, this is one of our favorites: Germany's newly elected government could hinder the expansion of renewable energy in the country with its plans to extend the lifetime of nuclear reactors, warns the German Renewable Energy Federation. Well, yes, it could do that, but...

Just in case you thought we’d have to wait a bit for some comment on the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill introduced yesterday, think again. Here’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska): “We’ve got to be honest with ourselves if we are truly going to decrease emissions,” Murkowski said.  “Nuclear energy...

Or, The Senate Moves on Climate Change. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) have presented the Senate’s version of the climate change bill that will start off in the Environment and Public Works committee chaired by Boxer. As we’ve seen with the health bill, legislation in the...

The Republicans have released the full text of their American Energy Act. You can read the whole thing here . We’ll note that it includes some points the Republicans have stressed since the last election: drill here drill now, strong favoring of domestic energy sources, disdain of regulation. But we...

And hard to catch, and tantalizingly within reach. That makes Susan G. Koman for the Cure and its annual Race for the Cure so important. But cure for what ? Nancy G. Brinker promised her dying sister, Susan G. Komen, she would do everything in her power to end *** cancer forever. In 1982, that promise...

"Mr. President, the American people get it. The manufacturing industry gets it. Organized labor gets it. And the international community, who are committed to reducing greenhouse gasses, certainly gets it. And what do all these parties get? "It's time that President Obama and this Congress...

Energy Northwest is giving nuclear energy a look-see . In a May 27 letter obtained by The Associated Press, the [Energy Northwest] consortium asked each of its 25 member public utilities and municipalities to pitch in $25,000 for further research into building one or more small reactors. Those who pay...

We’ve turned the spotlight on some politicians who really seem to have done their homework on climate change, cap-and-trade, nuclear energy and the other topics that will be important as the climate change and energy bills work their way through Congress. We did that because, first, they deserve a little...

Recently we tweeted (ugh!) about the NRC being named in American University's ISPII survey as "the best place to work in the Federal Government." Thanks to TweetDeck and Twitter user kangkang for pointing us to another job satisfaction survey (published in BusinessWeek a few weeks back...

We admit were puzzled by Martin Feldstein’s op-ed on cap-and-trade in the Washington Post. Feldstein is a professor of economics at Harvard University, so he knows how to count up the beans, but his piece took a peculiar slice at cap-and-trade right up top: Scientists agree that CO2 emissions around...