NEI Nuclear Notes

The DOE budget proposal for 2012 seeks to triple the department’s loan guarantee authority for new nuclear power plants, from $18.5 billion to a total of $54 billion, the same as requested for 2011. The budget also creates a new line item for small reactor licensing. Because Congress did not pass a budget to cover fiscal 2011, instead opting to fund the government at 2010 levels through continuing resolutions, several new programs included in the 2011 budget request failed to receive funding. Some of these programs have had their requests renewed in the 2012 request; others have been scrapped. In this year’s State of the Union address, President Obama proposed a clean energy standard, with the goal of generating 80 percent of U.S. electricity from clean energy sources by 2035. Nuclear energy, natural gas and clean coal, which have been excluded from previous attempts to create such a standard, are explicitly included in Obama’s standard, joining renewable energy sources as recognized m...