NEI Nuclear Notes

Matt Wald The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning at NEI. The Energy Department has posted the first installment of its Quadrennial Energy Review . Quite sensibly, the department cast a critical eye on the sorry state of energy infrastructure: overstressed gas lines that leak, sometimes catastrophically, and can’t meet the demand during cold spells; bottlenecks in the rail and canal systems that move coal and oil; and electric generating stations that starve for fuel when the coal pile freezes. But the sections of the plan that have been published so far do not give any credit to generation technologies that do not add strain to the fuel shipment infrastructure. To the department’s credit, officials there say that they are working to “unbundle” the attributes of various electricity generation systems, and to assign appropriate values to each attribute, including transportation requirements. Nuclear power plants,...

President Obama in January directed the heads of nearly two dozen federal agencies to create an integrated review of U.S. energy policy “in the context of economic, environmental, occupational, security, and health and safety priorities.” The task force is charged with developing “integrated guidance to strengthen U.S. energy policy,” building on the administration’s Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future and Climate Action Plan . The first of the quadrennial energy reviews is due this coming January. It will be updated every four years thereafter, if future administrations continue with it. Quadrennial might sound like a old European dance (that’s a quadrille), but it’s a kind of roadmap timed to occur near the mid-point of an administration’s term. Even if the review is based on administration priorities that the next president does not follow, it will encourage continuity and transparency in energy policy. Public comments were due October 10. NEI submitted a few, focusing on ...