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Guest Post: Alex Flint Introduces NEI's Congressional Resource Guide

By Eric McErlain
Alex Flint
The following guest post was submitted by Alex Flint, NEI's senior vice president, governmental affairs. 

One of NEI’s most important roles is ensuring that policymakers and their staffs have access to information they want about our industry. We pride ourselves in having on hand the technical expertise to answer any and all questions, and we are always willing to bring to Washington the experts with first-hand knowledge from our facilities.

But today, just having the information isn’t enough; we are also working to ensure that it is available whenever and however members and their staff want it. In past years, we would spend the first few months of each Congress delivering detailed three-ring binders to House and Senate offices. Those binders were crammed full of information about how reactors work, the uranium fuel cycle, and radiation, and included jobs and economic data broken down by state and district.
NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel

That's not how information works today. Members and their staffs don’t want information on our schedule; they want it on their schedule, and then they want it instantly. It is a Google world.

NEI's Congressional Resource Guide is our effort to respond to the new way Members and staff want information. We have organized it so that the issues we think policymakers may want are at their fingertips, and we will keep it constantly updated.

We’re not sure how this is going to be received. Some people appreciated the individual attention associated with sitting down to thumb through a binder, but we also know the majority of those binders were, shall we say, 'recycled.'


Let us know if the information we have posted is the right stuff – we’ve got plenty more where it came from – and let us know if making this information available on the web is enough. We want to meet your needs in this era of information overload, and your feedback is always appreciated.

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Alex for drafting this note to help us introduce our readers to the Guide. Below is a bulleted list of the main sections.

Finally, we also put together this short video with NEI's Staci Wheeler and Derrick Freeman to introduce the guide:

If you have any questions or comments about the Guide and its contents, please click here.
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