NEI Nuclear Notes

Alex Flint The following post was submitted by Alex Flint , NEI's Senior Vice President of Governmental Affairs. It’s an age-old parlor game in Washington, hoping for a shout-out in the State of the Union and then acting all nonchalant if you get one, or like the State of the Union doesn't matter if you don’t. President Obama has devoted some nice lines to nuclear energy in previous States of the Union. The best line (from my point of view, of course) was in 2010 when he said : But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. I’m delighted to report that five nuclear reactors are under construction today . Peak employment at each of those during construction will be about 3,500 people and, when they are completed (the first one is scheduled to come on line later this year ), each will provide 400-700 permanent jobs. ...

A pensive Hemsworth. Last week we first took note of the television ad blitz around Blackhat , the new cyber crime thriller directed starring Chris Hemsworth that premieres tomorrow all around the USA. Obviously, the timing for the movie could hardly be better, coming off the recent hacking of the Twitter feed for U.S. Central Command and word that cyber security will be front and center in next Tuesday's State of the Union. Why are we interested? As we mentioned last week, there's an early plot point that involves the hacking of control systems at a nuclear power plant - an eventuality that the industry has taken safeguards against . Thanks to bad timing, we weren't able to get a seat to a press screening on Tuesday night (props to NBC Universal for making a good faith effort to get us inside, we appreciate it), but we'll be paying for a ticket and seeing the film tomorrow afternoon at a theater in Washington a few blocks from the White House. Bill Gross...