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...

Never say never, but the cap-and-trade provisions in the Kerry-Boxer climate change bill have made a number of Senators nervous about supporting it. A number of Republicans have termed it cap-and-tax and some Democrats are not inclined toward it either. For example, take this bit from the Times West Virginian: Sen. Robert C. Byrd, (D-W.Va.), reportedly plans to vote against the resolution [the climate change bill] while Sen. Jay Rockefeller, (D-W.Va.), has “serious concerns” with the House’s amendments to the original resolution. Rockefeller, in other words, is still on the fence, but that’s an uncomfortable place to be. We have no opinion on the efficacy of cap-and-trade: it’s more market based than a direct carbon tax would be, but beyond that, we’ll take whatever gets the job of climate change mitigation done without destroying industries in the process. That said, and given the skittishness about it, might it be possible to come up with a bill that bypasses the cap-and-...

To give a sense of the impact of Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-Tenn.)insistence on nuclear energy, as noted below, consider the response of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in our Twitter feed to your right. Here’s the whole quote – it ran longer than 140 characters: You are suggesting a command and control: We order you to build 100 nuclear power plants. $700 billion cost to the ratepayers. No tax credits for them whatsoever. And you come up with other ideas, some of which I support, but costly to taxpayers. All I’m saying is, it is our belief that, if we do this right, we’re going to have those plants built – more plants than you want – and believe me, I’m not the biggest fan of nuclear energy. I believe it has to be part of the solution. Boxer offers enough pushback to establish bona fides, but she yields to reality in the end. Boxer also seems to have picked up on Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-N.M.) comment last week: You put a price on carbon, what you end up doing is sending a ver...