NEI Nuclear Notes

Mike McGarey The following is a guest post from Mike McGarey, senior advisor for local and state government affairs at NEI.  Over the weekend, at a governors conference here in Washington, I greeted a friend whom I’d met 10 years earlier when she was a staffer to then-Wisconsin Assemblyman (now Wisconsin Public Service Commission Chairman) Phil Montgomery. My friend’s former boss was among the early advocates for repealing Wisconsin’s longstanding moratorium on new nuclear, and we high-fived last week’s bipartisan state Senate passage of the repeal bill . The bill now awaits Governor Scott Walker’s promised signature. Enactment will ensure that reliable, zero-emissions nuclear will be among a host of technologies Wisconsin’s utilities and policymakers can consider going forward to meet the state’s energy, environmental and economic needs. Looking back, I recall a number of key players and events that slowly turned a polarizing issue – viewed by some as partisan, and a long shot

Rebecca Kern Last week, the University of Missouri School of Journalism held a workshop for journalists on nuclear energy . Also included as part of the program was a tour of the Callaway Energy Center operated by Ameren Missouri . One of the reporters on the tour, Bloomberg's Rebecca Kern , took photos of the plant and shared them via Storify . We've embedded her narrative below. Please check it out. [ View the story "Tour of Callaway Nuclear Plant " on Storify ]

Here at NEI, we try to keep an eye out for any television program or film that involves nuclear energy . As we've written in the past, the results can be something of a mixed bag . That's part of the reason that Pandora's Promise was such a pleasant surprise. After seeing nuclear energy viewed through a lens darkly most of the time, it was something of a shock to the system to see it described with optimism and hope. In Occupied , Norway is all in on thorium reactors. Enter Occupied (or Okkupert for my Norwegian relatives), a political thriller that debuted on European television last Fall and is now available here in the U.S. on Netflix . So what's the plot? Warning, minor spoilers ahead . Sometime in the near future, Norway is struck by a climate-related natural disaster, paving the way for the election of a Green Party government. Once in power, the new prime minister (Henrik Mestad) decides his nation needs to lead by example and stop using fossil fuels