NEI Nuclear Notes

Here’s something we’ve been expecting for quite awhile: The Minnesota House has voted to roll back a 16-year-old ban on new nuclear power plants. The provision was added to an energy bill Thursday on a 73-59 vote. It was the first time the House has approved the proposal, which passed the Senate last year. This has seemingly taken forever – the Senate voted last year – but no complaint from us if the state is proceeding judiciously. Easy enough to put it on a back burner in our mind while waiting for the next step. But, assuming Governor Tim Pawlenty signs it, another state ban gone. --- The government of Malaysia has approved the construction of a nuclear power plant with possible assistance from China or Japan. The reactor is scheduled to start operations in 2021 and will help to meet the country's soaring energy needs.  Chin said a nuclear plant was needed to meet the country's increasing demand for energy due to industrialization and to ensure energy se...

Last winter, we covered the U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen with considerable and then diminishing enthusiasm. What had seemed the best opportunity to replace the Kyoto protocols – which the U.S. did not join - foundered on disagreements between developed and developing nations. When world leaders showed up for a glorious signing ceremony that didn’t materialize, President Barack Obama and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (partnered with India, South Africa and Brazil) knocked together an agreement called the Copenhagen Accord, a non-binding set of principles. So was Copenhagen a failure ? Analyses from groups, including Deutsche Bank, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the liberal Center for American Progress, are challenging the snap indictment of the December conference, which drew wide criticism for failing to produce a new treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Our view is that no one at Copenhagen seemed particularly shaken, and certainly could have, w...

In his role as Sovereign of Vatican City, the Pope gives a speech to ambassadors each year to indicate the positions the state holds on various topics. In this year’s speech, Pope Benedict made it clear he was unhappy with the result of COP15: Speaking in French, he said he shared "the growing concern caused by economic and political resistance to combating the degradation of the environment." The pope expressed the hope that an agreement would be reached to effectively deal with this question before the end of the year. The President of the Vatican bank, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, went considerably further : However, he said that, when applied to environmental issues, nihilism produces "even more serious damage." In this case it leads to the attempt "to solve climate problems - where much confusion reigns - through lowering the birth rate and de-industrialization, rather than through the promotion of values that lead the individual to his original d...

At the COP15 conference in Copenhagen, President Barack Obama did not seem very pleased: So America is going to continue on this course of action [toward carbon emission reduction goals] no matter what happens in Copenhagen. But we will all be stronger and safer and more secure if we act together. That is why it is in our mutual interest to achieve a global accord in which we agree to take certain steps, and to hold each other accountable for our commitments. And perhaps a little doubtful of the outcome of the conference: We know the fault lines because we've been imprisoned by them for years. But here is the bottom line: We can embrace this accord, take a substantial step forward, and continue to refine it and build upon its foundation. We can do that, and everyone who is in this room will be a part of an historic endeavor -- one that makes life better for our children and grandchildren. Or we can again choose delay, falling back into the same divisions that hav...

Paul Genoa, NEI’s Director of Policy Development, has posted to The National Journal’s Copenhagen Insider blog. This is the entire post, but do pay a visit over to The National Journal for all the latest at COP15. Here is Mr. Genoa’s post: Reducing poverty and human suffering in the least developed countries is the right thing to do from an ethical/moral perspective, and it is in everyone’s own strategic self interest. Throughout human history, extreme poverty has led to war and environmental destruction. Lands are deforested, top soil eroded and villages plundered. It is in the interest of the developed countries to do what they can to avoid these environmental and security threats through effective development assistance. Because climate change will only make a bad problem worse for most of these countries, we need to step-up our global greenhouse gas mitigation efforts and help these countries adapt to future changes in the world’s climate. There is a direct correlation betwe...

Well, we can’t say the Climate Change Conference has been dull. On Friday we noted that Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, the negotiator for the G77, a group of 134 mostly developing countries, walked out of the conference. Since then, a good many of his members followed suit : African countries have refused to continue negotiations unless talks on a second commitment period to the Kyoto Protocol agreement are prioritized ahead of broader discussions involving non-Kyoto parties, such as China and the United States. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change executive secretary Yvo de Boer said an open-ended informal consultation was being convened by the Danish presidency for ministers and officials to resolve key issues. We’ll skip chatter of the conference collapsing unless it actually does collapse – it’s what you hear every time anyone gets dramatic at one of these things. Instead, let’s see what the African group wants: The cracks have appeared because one ...

On the fourth day of the COP15 conference, it entered what we might call its melodramatic phase, with various parties wanting to make points as strongly as possible. If you follow anything day-to-day – like, say, the health care bill – you know that up can become down very quickly and then back to up just as quickly. (Soap operas, speaking of melodrama, rest on this principle, but even they have a basis, however tenuous, in real life.) --- Most importantly, the Ad-hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action, the negotiators charged with producing a final document, has released a draft agreement indicating some key goals. The Washington Post has the details: The Cutajar draft [Michael Zammit Cutajar is chairman of the group] stipulates that the world should seek to keep global temperatures from rising beyond a ceiling of either 2.7 or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. It offers several possible targets developed countries could use for cutting their gr...

Well, almost a decade. The Kyoto Protocol did not have much use for nuclear energy and excluded it from favored energy sources. However, the leaked Danish accord – which seems unlikely to become the final document – see our post below for more on that – does not try to pick winners and losers: The international community can only be fully successful in addressing climate change if it is able to effectively develop, diffuse and deploy existing climate friendly technologies and rapidly innovate new and transformational climate-friendly technologies. World Nuclear News picks up on the nuclear thread: In a comment piece in the OECD Observer Luis Echavarri, head of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, complained about nuclear power's exclusion from two Kyoto Protocol flexibility mechanisms - the Joint Implementation and the Clean Development Mechanism - despite 'negligible' emissions compared to fossil fuels and its potential for direct foreign investment and technolo...

Our impression reading the daily news wrap-ups about COP15 is that everyone is holding their breaths over the arrival of the world leaders next week and that this first week has more the trappings of a, um, conventional convention – that is, trade show displays, break-out meetings on different topics, people dressed in Styrofoam tree costumes giving out flyers – that kind of thing. --- Probably the element gaining most attention is a leaked version of the final document, or at least Denmark’s version of same, which appears to heavily favor the developed over the developing world. (You can read the leaked document here and decide for yourself.) As you can imagine, this has gone over poorly : [Chairman of the G-77 Lumumba Stanislaus] Di-Aping, a Somali by birth, is reported to have told an urgently-called, closed meeting of 100 countries that the draft was tantamount to asking the G-77 to ‘sign a suicide pact,’ adding that the Danish draft was ‘worse than no deal’ and urging a...

Obama administration officials claim that the EPA announcement and the opening of the Copenhagen Climate Conference are "coincidental." Except that the administration knew when the conference was starting so could have chosen to hold the announcement. Not choosing to wait is a pretty good definition of “not a coincidence.” However, the EPA’s announcement has been long expected – and dreaded in some quarters – and identifies six gases for regulation: The Obama administration had signaled its intent to issue an endangerment finding for carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride) since taking office in January. Ms. Jackson announced a proposed finding in April and has since taken steps to draft the rules needed to back it up. And that’s what happened yesterday. Jeff Holmstead, head of air policy at the E.P.A. under the administration of George W. Bush and now an industry lobbyist, sai...

Have you heard ? A much-anticipated global meeting of nearly 200 nations — all seeking what has so far been elusive common ground on the issue of climate change — began [in Copenhagen] on Monday with an impassioned airing of what leaders here called the political and moral imperatives at hand. This is the United Nations Climate Change conference (or COP15), being held today through the 18th. We expect to have a lot more to say about the conference as it rolls along. In addition to our posts and our tracking events through Twitter (see our right-hand column if you don’t want to add us to your twitter feed), we will also receive dispatches from Paul Genoa, NEI’s director of policy development, who is on the ground in Copenhagen. Mr. Genoa will also be posting over at The National Journal’s Copenhagen Insider blog. --- To get started, though, let’s point to some resources you find helpful in following the conference, The Conference home page and a direct link to its news ...