NEI Nuclear Notes

Favorite reactor to President Obama’s climate change speech has to be this headline from Power Engineering : Reaction to Obama climate speech varies by interest group Who’da thunk it? The article does supply a roundup of “interest group” reactions. Here’s NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel for nuclear energy: [A]tomic power is critical to any domestic climate plan. "There is no debating this fact: Nuclear energy produces nearly two-thirds of America's carbon-free electricity,” Fertel said. So no debating – since it’s true – and it’s also true that nuclear energy will claim a large share of the carbon-free electricity pie for a long time to come. In all, the President’s shout-out to nuclear energy was not controversial, perhaps surprisingly so. Fertel is stating a simple truth that is generally accepted. Even the staunchest anti-nuclear advocate must be fairly sanguine by now about Obama’s view of the atom and can only sigh at the injustice of it all. If ...

Last Wednesday, word leaked out through media channels that President Obama would include a call for further nuclear arms reduction in a speech has was scheduled to deliver in Berlin, Germany at the famous Brandenberg Gate . When Fox News got hold of the story, they figured the best image to twin with a picture of the President would be a shot of a cooling tower at an unnamed nuclear power plant. Now you see the cooling tower ... Needless to say, while I understand why editors and reporters often conflate nuclear weapons and commercial nuclear energy, it doesn't make it any less annoying when it happens. As we've pointed out in the past, generating nuclear electricity actually contributes to a more peaceful world. The best example of why that's true has to be the Megatons to Megawatts program, an effort to downblend former Soviet nuclear warheads into reactor fuel. Right now, about half of the electricity generated by our nation’s nuclear energy facilities is from fu...

President Obama at 2013 SOTU Yesterday President Obama signed an Executive Order aimed at helping nation harden its critical infrastructure against cyber attacks, and introduced it to the nation as part of his State of the Union address . The Order states, "We can achieve these goals through a partnership with the owners and operators of critical infrastructure to improve cybersecurity information sharing and collaboratively develop and implement risk-based standards." The partnership model has a history of success, and it is prudent to continue and support this model. The nuclear power industry has an active partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security specifically geared toward enhancing the security of commercial users of nuclear materials. Under HSPD-7, the industry established the Nuclear Sector Coordinating Council (NSCC), and the government established the Government Coordinating Council (GCC).   These groups meet quarterly under the Critic...

Alex Flint Alex Flint, Nuclear Energy Institute senior vice president of governmental affairs, made the following comment in response to President Obama’s State of the Union address to Congress. “As the President and Congress work to return the economy to sound footing, it is worth remembering that sustained economic growth will require affordable, reliable energy supplies. For decades now, nuclear energy—with its added advantage of being the nation’s leading low-carbon source of electricity—has been one of the pillars of our electric sector. It is imperative that nuclear energy facilities continue to play a key role in the mix of electricity sources for U.S. energy, environmental and economic goals to be achieved. “Beyond the massive amounts of electricity they generate, nuclear energy facilities create hundreds of millions of dollars in direct and indirect revenue for state and local economies. With five reactors being built in the United States and nearly 70 more under const...

I wanted to share a note I received yesterday from my colleague David Bradish: Last week for the first time ever, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a news release estimating the number of green jobs that existed in the country in 2010 – 3.1 million. Below is the golden nugget on nuclear from the release: Utilities In private industry, the utilities industry accounted for 65,700 GGS [Green Goods and Services] jobs, or 11.9 percent of total private utilities employment. Among the industries involved in private sector electric power generation, nuclear power had the highest GGS employment with 35,800 jobs in 2010. Hydroelectric power generation had 3,700 total private GGS jobs in 2010. The other electric power generation industry, which includes electricity generated from biomass, sunlight, wind, and other renewable sources, had 4,700 GGS private sector jobs. Within this industry, electricity generated from wind had the highest employment with 2,200 jobs, followed by biomass with ...

President Barack Obama gave a major address today at Washington’s Georgetown University on energy issues. The full transcript is here . At it, he introduced his Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future, which takes an all-of-the-above approach to energy, with an eye to ramping down foreign imports in favor of domestic production – of oil, particularly. So today, I’m setting a new goal: one that is reasonable, achievable, and necessary.  When I was elected to this office, America imported 11 million barrels of oil a day.  By a little more than a decade from now, we will have cut that by one-third. I set this goal knowing that imported oil will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time.  And when it comes to the oil we import from other nations, we can partner with neighbors like Canada, Mexico, and Brazil, which recently discovered significant new oil reserves, and with whom we can share American technology and know-how. He continues...

NEI's Senior Vice President of Governmental Affairs, Alex Flint welcomes Pres. Obama's effort to unify safety lessons from Japan accident. We’ll keep posting these over the next few days. You can watch the whole set – still in progress – over at the NEI Network on YouTube.

Well, President Jimmy Carter was one. His panels were taken down by his successor, ronald Reagan, and ended up at Unity college in Maine. An environmental activist, Bill McKibben, decided to take them back to the White House last month to see if the current occupant, Barack Obama, might reinstall them. But he had a problem: As McKibben's party made its way from Maine to Washington, D.C., they had just one "nagging concern": They hadn't heard any confirmation from the White House that Obama would see them. But this has kind of a soft human interest angle, so why not? In the end, McKibben and company did end up with a meeting, with two unnamed "environmental bureaucrats," but the Carter panel and the Sungevity donation were refused. Sungevity was going to donate a “full solar system” – I’m not sure what that means – a system capable of running the entire White House? In any event, no go. The response? Not too good: The Obama administr...

Since the President’s support for nuclear was made clear at the State of the Union, our nuclear critics have dramatically ramped up their opposition to nuclear, particularly on loan guarantees. Besides continuously repeating the debunked 50 percent default rate for nuclear , one detail often neglected by our critics is how much loan volume is proposed as well as currently available for various technologies. Below is a slide used by Jonathan Silver, Executive Director of the Loan Guarantee Program Office, in a briefing on his Office’s 2011 budget. Currently, efficiency and renewables have $52.3 billion in loan volume, advanced vehicles have $25B, nuclear has $20.5B, and the fossil and fossil/EERE mix have $12.0B. If the President’s budget proposal is passed as is, nuclear will have almost as much loan volume as efficiency and renewables. Maybe one of the reasons our nuclear critics neglect to mention this fact is because the proposed loan volume for nuclear makes it about equal ...

Here’s the energy portion of President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address. The third paragraph is the keeper: in discussing more jobs – the theme of this year – Obama led with nuclear energy: Next, we need to encourage American innovation. Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history, an investment -- an investment that could lead to the world's cheapest solar cells or treatment that kills cancer cells but leaves healthy ones untouched. And no area is more ripe for such innovation than energy. You can see the results of last year's investments in clean energy in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide, helping to make advanced batteries, or in the California business that will put 1,000 people to work making solar panels. But to create more of these clean-energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives, and that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plan...

Here are the words : "There's no reason why technologically we can't employ nuclear energy in a safe and effective way. Japan does it and France does it and it doesn't have greenhouse gas emissions, so it would be stupid for us not to do that in a much more effective way." This is from Reuters. Video here . President Obama was speaking at a town hall in New Orleans. Go to the five minute mark for the nuclear comments. Correction: we corrected Obama’s quote based on the video. Reuters did get it wrong.

Stan Jakuba at Energy Tribune wrote a piece titled " Obama’s Stumble: Wind Power " in which he explains the limits of President Obama's renewable goals and what the President should promote as well (I'm copying the whole thing because I think it's that good): I like Barack Obama but I have doubts about his presidency when I hear him saying that the US will “double the amount of energy that comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term." He should know that that’s not possible. But instead, during his State of the Union speech, he proclaimed that we’ll reach that goal in three years, not four. Most anyone who has studied the energy situation must wonder about Obama's, or his advisors', energy experience. Presented with the numbers from the table (see below) he would realize that the majority of the renewable power comes from hydro and from wood, about 154 gigawatts. Readily available data show that the 6 percent for hydro and bio is pretty m...

With the announcement of the new Secretary of Energy possibly occurring this week, two more names have been scratched off the shortlist. Per The Kansas City Star , Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has removed her name from consideration . “Given the extraordinary budget challenges facing our state and my commitment to continuing the progress we’ve made in Kansas, I believe it is important to continue my service as governor of the great state of Kansas,” Sebelius said. And in a succinctly titled Washington Post piece up at The Fix , Chris Cillizza reports that " Dorgan Won't Be Energy Secretary ." Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) is no longer under consideration to be secretary of energy in President-elect Barack Obama's administration, according to transition officials. The decision was arrived at based on a belief within the former Illinois senator's inner circle that the plains state Democrat is more valuable to them where he is. "Senator Dorgan would be a fan...

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...

Time to scratch a name off your Energy Secretary candidate list? ABC 's Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz are reporting that retired Marine General James L. Jones has emerged as the leading candidate to serve as the National Security Adviser for President-elect Obama . The former head of NATO and U.S. forces in Europe, Jones is currently president and CEO of the Institute for 21st Century Energy . A move to the NSA could provide synergies with the work done at the ITCE ; where energy policy is viewed as integral to national security. Click here for more NNN coverage on who will be in the Obama Cabinet .

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...

The Hillary to State speculation drew most of the attention this weekend, but there was some Energy news. The AP is reporting that New Jersey Environmental Protection Commissioner Lisa Jackson has been named to the Obama-Biden transition team on Energy . Jackson joins Robert Sussman, a former deputy Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and 11 others. They will conduct a department review to provide Obama and key advisers with information they need to make policy, budgetary and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration. Per the Obama transition site , Jackson has been named a Team Lead for the EPA Review. Other Team Leads include Cecilia V. Estolano , CEO of the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles , and Robert Sussman , a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress . Some did play the cabinet parlor game this weekend: in the pages of Newsweek , Slate.com 's Jacob Weisberg lobbies for Al Gore to become Energy Secretary . The genius principle should ...

Add a new name to the list: the AP offers up former Indiana Congressman Philip Sharp . Sharp is currently serving as president of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Resources for the Future . And in a feature titled " The New Team ," The New York Times fills in the backstory of an Energy Secretary candidate first reported by the Washington Post 's Steve Mufson last week: (Ret.) General James L. Jones . Click here for more NNN coverage on who will be in the Obama Cabinet .

The parlor game of cabinet speculation continues... The Houston Chronicle lobbies for their hometown Mayor. The next secretary of energy needs expert understanding of the fossil fuel industry — without being owned by it or wedded to its dominance. This official must shepherd America from dependence on oil, and toward alternatives, without crippling the economy. As mayor of the nation's conventional and alternative energy capital, Houston Mayor Bill White is uniquely qualified for this post. He has the executive experience, having served as deputy energy secretary for President Bill Clinton; he is also a warrior against pollution and environmental depredation, who was nevertheless backed by Houston's energy industry and has long worked on guiding Houston's economy to greater diversity. The Politico is reporting that former eBay SVP, Steve Westly , is " emerging as a strong dark horse candidate for energy secretary. " Westly co-chaired Cleantech and Green Busin...

Forbes magazine editor-in chief and publisher, Steve Forbes, a former presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000 , looks at the future Obama administration in this week's issue . The pull quote: Though an Obama Administration won’t try to lift the ban on drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the next President will allow the removal of more and more barriers to offshore drilling. Even more amazing will be his support of new nuclear power plant construction. Obama will let congressional Democrats and Republicans take the legislative lead, but he will quietly make it clear that he’ll sign virtually any pro-nuclear legislation they can pass—while publicly pretending to be mighty reluctant to do so. (H/T to P.P.)