NEI Nuclear Notes

The following is a guest post by Leslie Barbour, Director of Legislative Programs for NEI.  After 21 years working at the Nuclear Energy Institute as an industry lobbyist, I retire today with a great sense of accomplishment for what the industry has achieved during this time. When I was hired in 1993, the industry was negotiating a success path for used fuel disposal that would enable companies to ship fuel to Yucca Mountain, Nevada. President Clinton had just appointed Hazel O’Leary as the first woman and first African American Secretary of Energy. We soon realized that nuclear energy was not a favored energy option of the Administration when she demoted the Office of Nuclear Energy’s leadership from Assistant Secretary to Director. The Administration then began cutting nuclear energy R&D funding from $147 million in 1994 to $2 million in 1998. The only program left was support for universities. The industry suffered the loss of the gas reactor and sodium cooled reactor prog...

Is the nation beginning to head a new direction on how to manage its used nuclear fuel? Here's the direction Senator Domenici thinks we should go : The Senate’s longtime champion of nuclear energy said today that other communities, not just Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, should be considered for storing the nation’s nuclear waste. New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici’s comments this morning reflect Washington’s deep frustration over the Department of Energy’s endless delays at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry has quietly been soliciting other communities as potential hosts for a repository, and Domenici said he would introduce legislation that would free up money from the Yucca Mountain account to do just that. Doing so would represent a major policy shift on Yucca. The multi-billion-dollar Yucca fund is considered sacred, having been built from fees collected from ratepayers in states with nuclear energy. ... Domenici’s comments came as both Senate and House appropriators this ...

Several leading policymakers have made statements encouraging construction of new nuclear power plants over the past week. Here are some of these statements. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, had this to say about nuclear energy in a speech focusing on America's energy challenges yesterday: “In the decade since my address at Harvard, we have changed the face of the debate on nuclear energy. We did this by ensuring that it was framed in the context of how to advance nuclear energy, not whether we should… The clearest evidence of this shift in thinking came with the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which included loan guarantees, tax incentives, risk insurance, and an extension of the Price-Anderson Act… Consider that today, there are 104 nuclear reactors in service around the nation. Together, they displace the same amount of carbon dioxide as is emitted by nearly every passenger car on the road in America. ...