NEI Nuclear Notes

Wasserman asks: Who Will Pay for America's Chernobyl? Answer: No one – Because it can’t happen here. The premise of Wasserman's article is erroneous. It is physically impossible for any U.S. nuclear power plant to explode like the Chernobyl reactor did. They are a completely different design that cannot run out of control and explode. And (unlike Chernobyl) all U.S. nuclear plants have heavily fortified containment buildings that are designed to withstand the worst case accident, nor can our reactors catch on fire. The fact is, Chernobyl can't happen here. The worst thing you can do to a U.S. light water reactor - overheat the fuel and cause it to melt - is what happened at Three Mile Island 30 years ago. But the TMI accident had no impact on the health of the people or the environment around the facility because of all of the safety systems built into the plant. With all of the changes and additional safety measures made because of the lessons learned from TMI, it is v...

Harvey Wasserman's HuffPo post, Cracking the Corporate Media's Iron Curtain Around Death at Three Mile Island , shows that he knows no bounds in his determination to scare and mislead the public. It is grossly irresponsible for him to claim that the accident at TMI killed people without offering a shred of evidence to support the claim. And by implying there has been a cover up, he also has severely insulted the good people of Pennsylvania. Wasserman claims that the "Soviet-style Iron Curtain" formed between corporate media and the "alternatives" is hiding deaths caused by the accident. This not only denigrates media outlets that won't embrace his unfounded allegations, it maligns Pennsylvanians. Would the people of the Middletown Press & Journal , the Harrisburg Patriot-News and numerous other local and regional newspapers, radio and TV organizations hide the truth from their friends and neighbors? Would local doctors, the Harrisburg Hospital, Pen...

This is probably one of the most entertaining debates on nuclear energy I've seen in a long time ! By the way, their debate about $50 billion of loan volume in the Senate's "stimulus" package goes to "projects that avoid, reduce, or sequester air pollutants or anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and employ new or significantly improved technologies as compared to technologies in service in the United States at the time the guarantee is issued." The actual appropriations for the $50B in loan volume is $500 million because the Congressional Budget Office scores the cost of the program at one percent of loan volume . But like I said in a previous post , if the program works as designed and no projects default, then none of this money is needed. Also in the Senate's "stimulus" package but not mentioned in the debate is $95 billion in loan volume earmarked solely for commercially proven renewable energy pro...

Here's a funny clip from late last week where CNN's Glenn Beck weighs in on the return of the musicians from the "No Nukes" era :

Kyle Woodlock, the grad student at Georgia Tech who kicked off his YouTube career with a rebuttal to Harvey Wasserman and his "No Nukes" compatriots , has just published a new video where he makes a fair comparison between nuclear energy and renewables : I'm anxious to see the next video.

In today's edition of the Washington Times , Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation takes on Bonnie Raitt and friends over their new music video .

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...

If there's one media outlet that's gotten the story right over the online battle over nuclear energy and loan guarantees, it's Salon and reporter Katharine Mieszkowski. Go there right now to read, Nuclear War on YouTube . And be sure to watch the companion video that cuts all of the videos together in such a way that none of the anti-nuke charges goes unanswered. I hope the folks at our member companies are taking notice of this. If our industry is going to fight and win online the fight over this music video ought to serve as a blueprint for how we go forward. UPDATE : More from Rod Adams .

Back at YouTube this weekend, anti-nuke activist Harvey Wasserman posted a video rebuttal to Elizabeth King's debut on YouTube last week . I was thinking about getting some folks together to rebut Wasserman, but as it turns out, someone else beat us to it . I'm guessing you might be familiar with his previous work : It's good to know the nuclear energy business has so many friends out there. Thanks for the assist. One final note: In the video, Wasserman charges that NEI "has lots of money" to produce video rebuttals, which gave me a pretty good laugh. For the record, our original video was shot with a Casio digital camera that you could fit in your pants pocket and a $50 tripod. We did our post-production -- if you could call it that -- on a Dell laptop using Windows Movie Maker. Altogether, the process took about 4.5 hours from start to finish. Which makes me wonder: Just how much money did Wasserman and his friends spend on their original video? Something...