NEI Nuclear Notes

A few minutes ago, a discharge petition to bring a vote on the re-authorization of the Ex-Im Bank received its 218th signature. NEI issued the following tweets praising the action, and is now urging the House of Representatives to vote on the bill re-authorizing the Bank as soon as possible. Thanks to @RepFincherTN08 and over 200 other House members who voted in favor of Ex-Im Bank discharge petition. #ExIm4Jobs (1/4) — Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) October 9, 2015 Now that HR 3611 has escaped committee, a vote to reauthorize the Bank should be scheduled ASAP. #ExIm4Jobs (2/4) — Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) October 9, 2015 A vote for Ex-Im is a vote for jobs, exports & US leadership in nuclear technology. #ExIm4Jobs (3/4) — Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) October 9, 2015 Bipartisan majority in both Houses supports the Bank. A vote ASAP would be an exercise in bipartisanship/good government. #ExIm4Jobs (4/4) — Nuclear Energy Inst. (@NEI) October 9, 2015 For more on t...

In talking about the budget for the Department of Energy and particularly its Office of Nuclear Energy, we often zero in, logically enough, on the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate. These are the committees that will ultimately determine what the budget will be. While appropriations committees determine what money is given to various programs, authorizing committees decide the general policies and programs that Appropriators can fund. In talking about the budget for the Department of Energy and particularly the Office of Nuclear Energy, the general policies and programs are decided in the House by the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee . And what this committee decides show how things might go over the next year and beyond. The Science Committee members have consistently expressed a lot of interest in next-generation nuclear technology – and on a bipartisan basis. That brings us to this amendment from Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.): Developing an advanc...

Industries are dynamic entities that are always in process. That means they don’t lend themselves to top 10 lists, which work better for finished objects such as movies and books. We may say that Godzilla was the best 2014 movie to feature Yucca Mountain (built not for used fuel but to imprison a malevolent insect), but that’s a different kind of judgment. Some of the items we’ll include here started earlier than 2014 or started in 2014 but will not reach a milestone until 2015 or beyond. That’s how it goes. With that in mind, let’s look at 2014: From a financial  viewpoint, two items stand out: the President’s  request to revive the Decommissioning and Decontamination tax on nuclear plants was turned back in the appropriations bill that passed for 2015. The industry has no problem paying that tax – in fact, it’s paid the full amount two times over. It just was not eager for a third go-round – and Congress agreed. Similarly, the court-ordered end of the Nuclear Waste Fe...

The New York Times takes a look at the, well, pork in the omnibus budget bill being fast tracked through Congress. (This legislation will set budget priorities and fund government operations through October, the end of fiscal year 2014.) Read the whole thing , of course, but here’s the relevant part for us, which kicks off the article: A cryptic reference turns up on Page 399 of a six-inch-thick piece of legislation that congressional appropriators unveiled Monday night, calling for an extra $155 million worth of financing for the Department of Energy to promote its nuclear projects. This is the same program — helping for-profit companies build a new generation of small nuclear reactors — that has been called a boondoggle by some spending watchdog groups. But lawmakers, including Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, pressed by industry lobbyists, opted to increase the program’s budget by 21 percent above the Obama administration’s request. “I’m very pleas...

Alex Flint The following guest post was submitted by Alex Flint, NEI's senior vice president, governmental affairs.  One of NEI’s most important roles is ensuring that policymakers and their staffs have access to information they want about our industry. We pride ourselves in having on hand the technical expertise to answer any and all questions, and we are always willing to bring to Washington the experts with first-hand knowledge from our facilities. But today, just having the information isn’t enough; we are also working to ensure that it is available whenever and however members and their staff want it. In past years, we would spend the first few months of each Congress delivering detailed three-ring binders to House and Senate offices. Those binders were crammed full of information about how reactors work, the uranium fuel cycle, and radiation, and included jobs and economic data broken down by state and district. NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel That's not...

Congress voted on an omnibus appropriations bill that basically funds the entirety of the federal government for the next year. Naturally, our interest lies with the nuclear energy portion of the Department of Energy’s budget. The executive summary is that the total is more than requested by the Obama administration earlier this year; the accident in Japan has been acknowledged in the budget but how to proceed has been largely left to processes already in place – the NRC’s Near-Term task force, for example; and Yucca Mountain, dead or alive, is not funded. Here are the details: The appropriations bill provides $769 million for nuclear science and technology, higher than the president’s $754 million and a sharp increase from the $584 million approved initially by the Senate. Of particular note is the restoration of $67 million for small reactor development and licensing, which the Senate had earlier zeroed out. Under a cost-shared government-industry program, DOE will select two...

At a press conference at NEI, Alex Flint, senior vice president for government affairs at NEI, discussed some priorities for the upcoming Congress. The question-and-answer session with reporters focused on several key issues affecting the nuclear energy industry: a clean energy standard, DOE loan guarantees, EPA water regulations, the Nuclear Waste Fund fee and a federal corporation for managing used nuclear fuel. A recurring theme was that nuclear energy could be an area for bipartisan cooperation on energy legislation in the new Congress. Original reporting from NEI’s Nuclear Energy Overview follows:  Nuclear energy might hold the key to a compromise on energy legislation in the next session of Congress, an NEI executive told reporters during a briefing on the impact of the midterm elections on the nuclear energy industry. “Nuclear energy is at the center of the debate about energy policy,” said Alex Flint. “We view it as the middle ground on which both parties can compromise...

As we’re sure you know from Schoolhouse Rock, when a bill goes through committee, members can propose amendments to enhance this aspect or that of the given legislation. In the House, amendments are sent to the Rules Committee and accepted or rejected there, not in committee or on the floor. The Senate does it in committee and again in the full chamber, where it can become a bit of a free-for-all. (The amendment process is where a lot of pork can get into a bill, but also a lot of good refinements.) In the process surrounding the 2010 Appropriations bill in the House, this is an opportunity for Republicans to get their priorities into mostly Democratic-written legislation (and also Democrats not on the Appropriations committee) – it was, of course, the other way around before 2006 – and hope the amendments are not then voted down by the Rules committee. We’re not Congressional historians, but we suspect the element of show is important here, and most amendments from the opposition...

Over the past few days, the Obama administration experienced significant pushback on its decision to scale back the Yucca Mountain project – more, we admit, than we really expected. (Just scroll down to earlier posts – we’ve watched this happen with considerable pleasure.) Polls, and not just those from NEI, show growing support for nuclear energy – we think NEI can claim some credit for public opinion coming around - and good polls makes supporting nuclear energy easier for even Democratic Congressfolks to do. Consequently, the administration has had to try to provide a fuller explanation, especially to the Senate, of their plans for moving forward. These have been positive developments – so far, so good. But Congress and the administration still shows reluctance, perhaps it is a hangover from the No Nukes 1980s. Exciting times, those. Thus, rather than act precipitously, we get The Dance of the Blue Ribbons : Sen. Harry Reid said today he is working to form a study group t...

Politico report on the maneuvering around energy that the House is attempting: while making conciliatory noises about offshore drilling, the goal is to run out the clock while letting endangered Democrats make the case back home that they’re in-line with the current polls that support all those new derricks. And why might the Dems do this? [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi’s [D-Calif.] gambit rests on one big assumption: that Democrats will own Washington after the election and will be able to craft a sweeping energy policy that is heavy on conservation and fuel alternatives while allowing for some new oil drilling. Democrats see no need to make major concessions on energy policy with a party poised to lose seats in both chambers in just three months — even if recess-averse Republicans continue to pound away on the issue. Well, okay. Pelosi’s energy preferences don’t seem that far away from the bi-partisan energy bill we wrote about yesterday, so that might stand up well in a new ...

Details over at Atomic Insights .

In our final installment on nuclear energy and loan guarantees, Richard Myers, NEI's Vice President of Policy Development , explains why subsidies aren't a four-letter word in American political history. Subsidy Is Not A Four-Letter Word Can we talk about subsidies? In our last post , we took issue with the anti-nuclear refrain – “massive subsidies for the nuclear power industry” – and showed that the energy loan guarantee program is self-financing and clearly not a subsidy. But this unrestrained use of the word “subsidy” troubles me. I can’t think of another word in the English language that is so overused or so misused. Overused to the point of being meaningless, misused as a slur, and employed selectively when it suits the user’s narrow self-interest. Think about it: Is there anything in American life that is not subsidized, and appropriately so? We subsidize higher education and production of agricultural products. We subsidize home ownership thro...

Yesterday, I forwarded a note from Richard Myers, NEI's Vice President of Policy Development , concerning nuclear energy and loan guarantees , the issue that Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash came to Washington to agitate about earlier this week . But while emotional rhetoric is one thing, the facts are another. Here's Part II: The Loan Guarantees Authorized by the Energy Policy Act Are Not a Subsidy For the past few weeks, we’ve been regaled with horror stories about the loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants authorized in the 2005 Energy Policy Act . The story line from the anti-nuclear groups goes like this: “huge bailout” and “a blank check for the nuclear power industry” and “massive subsidies for the nuclear power industry.” Here are the facts. First, the Energy Policy Act authorizes loan guarantees for a portfolio of 10 clean energy technologies. New nuclear power plants are just one of the 10. Here’s the list, verbatim from th...

Over the past few days, I've run into more than my share of angry and exasperated colleagues here at NEI . The reason: All the attention being given to the musicians who hit town yesterday to attack nuclear energy . Don't get me wrong, everyone understands that Americans have a right to speak their minds on the issues of the day. But what's bugging us is that -- with a few notable exceptions -- the press is giving these musicians a free pass when it comes to what they're saying about the industry, in particular about nuclear energy and loan guarantees. Richard Myers is NEI's Vice President of Policy Development . Over the next few days we'll be featuring a series of posts from him that will help cut through the propaganda and misinformation. Part I follows: We Know What They’re Against, But What Are They For? For the last 10 days or so, I’ ve watched the anti-nuclear groups (and their rock star friends) attacking nuclear power , and the use of federal lo...

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the debate over how to constrain carbon emissions .

On the campaign trail in Greenville, South Carolina, Senator John McCain answers a question about the role nuclear energy can play in U.S. energy policy:

From Newsmax : Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Wednesday that America's current energy policy needs revamping with more focus placed on alternative forms of energy. "We need to increase our technology of hybrid cars," McCain told reporters after a campaign stop at a restaurant in the Detroit suburb of Plymouth. "We need to increase our use of ethanol and all kinds of alternative fuels, and we need to go back to nuclear power." For previous posts on Senator McCain from our archives, click here .

Some hearings scheduled for next week that we'll be watching. Links provided where available: Senate Finance --Energy, Natural Resources and Infrastructure Sub May 1, 10am, 215 Dirksen " Advanced Technology Vehicles " House Energy and Commerce -- Energy and Air Quality Sub May 3, 10am, 2322 Rayburn "Small Electric Grid" House Natural Resources Committee May 1, 2pm, 1325 Longworth “The Future of Fossil Fuels: Geological and Terrestrial Sequestration ofCarbon Dioxide House Science and Technology -- Energy and Environment Sub May 3, 2pm, 2318 Rayburn "Changes in US Global Climate Change Research Program"

From the American Public Power Association : Members of the American Public Power Association today adopted unanimously a resolution urging Congress to “consider carefully all solutions for addressing climate change” and to incorporate 10 principles in any new federal policy designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). They said federal legislation must be economy-wide and apply to all industry sectors, consider the financial impact on consumers, and protect the ability of U.S. industries to compete in world markets. They also asked Congress to ensure that incentives for the development and deployment of renewable and clean energy are provided on a comparable basis to all sectors of the electric utility industry, including the not-for-profit, community- and state-owned public power sector. Here are the relevant passages: NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED: That the American Public Power Association (APPA) supports efforts to provide the NRC with all the regulatory and statutor...

A couple of weeks ago Eric let you know that the January/February 2007 issue of Nuclear Policy Outlook is available online. Well, now all issues going back through 2004 are available in NEI's online Library. Previously a quarterly newsletter for NEI members only, Outlook now publishes on a bimonthly basis so everyone can read analysis of the nuclear energy industry’s most critical policy issues. The Jan/Feb edition examines how the changing congressional leadership will affect the industry and its legislative priorities. Up next for March/April is used nuclear fuel management. In the meantime, check out the archive.