NEI Nuclear Notes

Despite our pre-Thanksgiving prep-for-bloat kind of lethargic mood, we thought we point you to a couple of interesting videos. Here's one from the BBC about the disassembly of the Sellafield Cumbrian plant. This isn't a nuclear power plant, but a plant at which plutonium was produced for bombs. We can't think of a nicer plant to go to pieces. Note: If you're not British, you'll have to listen quite closely to decommissioning manager Euan Hutton, who narrates, because he frequently disappears into a thicket of accent. Worth watching more than once to catch all he has to say. --- Well, all right, we can rouse ourselves from thoughts of gobblers and bog fruit to express dismay about Jim Riccio's sourpuss ding on NEI central. Of all people, he knows that advocacy organizations make the most positive case possible for the object of their advocacy and he also knows that credibility craters if NEI or Greenpeace or any other such entity spins facts into lies or hi...

Over at The Huffington Post , Greenpeace 's Jim Riccio offers up some red meat in his provocatively titled guest post, President Obama and Nuclear Power's Spin Campaign . Riccio accuses NEI of mischaracterizing President-elect Obama's support for nuclear power and dismisses the work done by the industry association as "propagandist." Back in July, at the start of the presidential campaign, another claim of mischaracterization was made; this time by the nonpartisan Factcheck.org in their article, A False Accusation About Energy . We’ve been through this. Obama has not said a flat-out "no" to nuclear, as the ad claims. Instead he has said he is in favor of nuclear energy if it is clean and safe, saying in his energy plan that "it is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table." In October, The New York Times , in its presidential candidate Check Point series, had this to say, ...And contr...

The Diane Rehm show is not on all NPR stations, but if you can get it, Scott Peterson and Jim Riccio are on the show NOW talking about what the future of nuclear should be in the United States. (Note Diane is not hosting today. The show is being hosted by Frank Sesno .) For online access, try here and then click on WFYI HD-1 (in the middle of the page).

Yesterday on WNYC-FM's Brian Lehrer Show, Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy , made a joint appearance with Jim Riccio, Nuclear Policy Analyst for Greenpeace . Normally, I'd suggest that you take a listen, but given the fact that Riccio spent most of the interview talking over Cravens and not letting her get a word in edgewise, I'm afraid there's not much to recommend it. However, there was one point of contention between the two guests that I think bears closer examination. At one point during the interview, Cravens made the point that there hasn't been any other core meltdowns of a commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S., at which point Riccio started berating Cravens about Fermi 2, and how she should have read a book by John G. Fuller called We Almost Lost Detroit concerning the accident. Fermi 2 is a 1,098 MWe General Electric boiling water reactor owned by DTE Energy and currently still in operation. There has ...