NEI Nuclear Notes

Alex Flint Earlier today, Alex Flint , NEI's Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, sent the following letter to Senators Dianne Feinstein and Lamar Alexander, concerning the possible reinstatement of the Uranium D&D tax: Dear Chairman Feinstein and Ranking Member Alexander: The $200 million tax on the customers of nuclear utilities proposed in your mark of the fiscal year 2015 Energy and Water Development Act is unreasonable and unjustified. The tax is ostensibly to pay utility customers’ share of decommissioning the federal government’s uranium enrichment plants because of enrichment services U.S. utilities purchased from the federal government from 1969 to 1992. However, those utilities’ contracts with the Department of Energy and its predecessor organizations required full cost recovery. As a result, the utilities’ share of clean-up costs was paid even though the plants, which had produced enriched uranium for the weapons programs, were already contaminat...

The Victorville (Calif.) Daily News writes something we basically agree with : Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that a Korean-led consortium has won a landmark contract, valued at about $20.4 billion, to build four nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates. U.A.E., remember, is awash in oil, yet has opted to build the reactors. Why? U.A.E.’s leaders are not fools. It’s cheaper (and ultimately safer if one considers that nuclear reactors do not emit any of those pollutants enviros consider unsafe to human health and the planet, such as CO2) to build the plants so the oil saved can be sold elsewhere. But the editorial this appears in is not really about nuclear energy. Instead, it dings Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for wanting to make national monuments out of about one million acres of Mojave desert so as to block development of wind farms and solar arrays. We looked around to see what this was about : The area of concern to Feinstein is between the Mojave Na...

In the middle of the D segment on CNN's Late Edition , we find this interesting exchange between Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA): Blitzer : What about the nuclear program that Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is recommending? Feinstein : I think there are a couple of problems with nuclear yet. I think the technology with respect to waste. The training with respect to human, preventing human error has greatly improved. And it may well be possible to do some nuclear. That again, the permit system is extraordinarily difficult. [It] will take time. In the meantime, I think we have to begin to look into things like speculation on the futures market with respect to oil. Blitzer : You think there's been some hanky panky there? Feinstein : Oh, yeah. I think there has been. Blitzer : Do you agree on that? Hutchinson : We cannot bring down the cost of gasoline at the pump unless we produce more. And that means nuclear power. We haven't had an accid...