Skip to main content

The Dallas Morning News Edit Board and Nuclear Energy

Over at the Dallas Morning News' Editorial Board Blog, James Mitchell posed the question of the day about nuclear energy.
The Senate's energy bill strongly advocates nuclear energy as a way to make the United States more energy diversifiied. Past efforts to promote nuclear energy in the 1970s ran into environmental opposition, not-in-my-backyard sentiment, and herky-jerky federal policy that left utlilities and rate payers holding a huge financial bag of costs.

Today's question is really five: Pick any portion

How comfortable are you in making nuclear energy a major component of national energy policy and do you have concerns that government policy will not again pull the rug out from under the industry in the future?

Should the government subsidize its development, which means picking winners and losers in the marketplace and possibly putting wind and solar on the backburner?

Should we aspire to be France, where virtually every KW of electricity comes from nuclear power?

What should be done about the waste issue - long term short term?
It was hard not to sit up and notice right away, as our CEO Skip Bowman was in Dallas just last week to give a speech about the state of the industry.

In any case, here are the responses, keyed off the names of the writers who posted them:

James Mitchell
Keven Ann Willey
Todd Robberson
Mike Hashimoto
Todd Robberson

I'd encourage our readers to stop by and participate in the discussion. And please say thanks to the bloggers on the edit board for giving our issue a little more air.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should