NEI Nuclear Notes

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted a bill that would ensure that 33% of the state’s energy would be powered by renewable energy sources by 2020. The legislature delivered just such a bill. The governor now threatens to veto it and impose a solution via executive order instead. Why? Environmentalists who have been told about the governor's still-evolving plans said Schwarzenegger also was considering directing the California Air Resources Board to look at broadening the state's definition of renewable energy sources to include large hydroelectric dams and nuclear energy plants. Right now, this is a comment just in passing. Nuclear energy isn’t renewable in the way the term is understood, so that’s just semantics. And Schwarzenegger hasn’t said, as far as we can find, that he feels the state can’t achieve its goal without nuclear – we’re going to assume it, but we don’t know it. What we do know is that the legislation had broad support – environmentalis...

Some interesting comments coming from President-elect Obama in his address to the bipartisan Governors' Global Climate Summit , scheduled to begin later this morning. It would appear that, despite the global financial crisis, cap-and-trade is still front and center. From the prepared remarks, In particular, I want to commend Governor Sebelius, Governor Doyle, Governor Crist, Governor Blagojevich and your host, Governor Schwarzenegger –all of you have shown true leadership in the fight to combat global warming. And we’ve also seen a number of businesses doing their part by investing in clean energy technologies. But too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office. My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process. That will start with a federal cap and trade system. We will establish strong annual targets that set u...

"Nuclear power is a dead-end in California, and we shouldn't be wasting resources on such an expensive and problematic energy option," said Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California. "We have far cleaner, cheaper and safer energy resources like solar, wind and geothermal, and we should be investing in those." Well, that's not very positive, is it? After all, the Santa Anna wind doesn't blow all the time, and although they do have some very large deserts, they unfortunately lurk under moonlight half the time. But California, which gets about 15% of their electricity from nuclear energy - from two plants in the state plus another over in Arizona - is becoming uneasy about reaching their carbon emissions goal. Consequently, nuclear energy keeps entering the conversation. This story from the Sacramento Bee rounds up the attitudes about nuclear energy in the state. Once you've got the Sierra Club out of the way, things start looking up....

While we wouldn’t mind having a few fuel rods in the basement to fulfill all our electricity needs, the likelihood of that happening in the near term is, um, poor. However, solar panels are available now and unlike mini-windmills, which only show kids what the days of TV-aerial-choked rooftops looked like, panels can sit flat upon rooftops. Jimmy Carter famously installed panels in the White House (His successor, Ronald Reagan, took them out; who’s laughing now?), but they’re back. It’s like a comeback, only not a Norma Desmond -crazy kind of comeback. We bring this all up to point you to a site we’ve seen at a couple of other sites – quite the cannibalizers, we – which allows you to locate your house or the house you’d like to own to see how plausible it is for you to fuel your big screen TV and Wii with solar panels. The site encourages you to sign up if you want it to save your work, but you can play around with it without giving any personal data. We tried several possibi...

Slate is asking the question: Who is a better spokesman for the environmental movement, former Vice President Al Gore or California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ? The answer may surprise you.