NEI Nuclear Notes

It’s been awhile since we added anybody to our blogroll. Today we have the pleasure of adding Nuclear Fissionary who Idaho Samizdat introduced several weeks back. Jack Gamble, main contributor at Nuclear Fissionary, has done an informative job of refreshing our memories on costs, capacity factors, Chernobyl and so on. As well as Jack’s good work, this week has been a great week for pro-nuclear bloggers out there. As many who read here know, the debate about the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant is raging on. Atomic Insights knocked out some very useful information about how much total tritium leaked at VY as well as exposed the misinformation from Vermont Senate Pro Tem Peter Shumlin on Vermont Yankee . Apparently many people in the Vermont state legislature believe solar provides 30 percent of Germany’s electricity; an achievement that gives hope for renewable advocates. Well, Rod and Meredith from Yes Vermont Yankee squashed that false info (solar provides less than one percent) a...

We admit were puzzled by Martin Feldstein’s op-ed on cap-and-trade in the Washington Post. Feldstein is a professor of economics at Harvard University, so he knows how to count up the beans, but his piece took a peculiar slice at cap-and-trade right up top: Scientists agree that CO2 emissions around the world could lead to rising temperatures with serious long-term environmental consequences. But that is not a reason to enact a U.S. cap-and-trade system until there is a global agreement on CO2 reduction. The proposed legislation would have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. So, in other words, an American effort would cut emissions “trivially small” – if no other country participated. From this premise, Feldstein spins the rest of his argument: Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. ...

We had a bit of fun with Rep. Joe Barton yesterday, but politicians say all kinds of things and a good amount of it leads to fun. But fair’s fair and Barton has put up an article more fully explaining his position on cap-and-trade. It can be found at American Daily Review, which describes itself as “News, politics and conservative commentary without compromise,” so Barton can speak with at least some political filters dialed down. His article is called “Democrats Cap & Trade Plan: Sending us back to 1875” Here’s a taster : Nobody understands exactly what the legislation means in dollars and cents - more on this later - but to experience how it would feel to lower your personal carbon footprint to the size this bill proposes, set the flux capacitor to 1875. That’s the last time Americans’ carbon emissions matched the goals set by the Waxman-Markey legislation. What, the old DeLorean is up on cinder blocks in the front yard again? In that case you can test drive Waxman-...

We’ve mentioned here, as the cap-and-trade legislation heats up, that conservatives have had a problems with it despite it being the more conservative carbon emissions reduction method. The more liberal one is a carbon tax, which could conceivably have some kind of progressivity, or become more onerous as years passed, but would really put an immediate burden on the energy section. We’d position them this way ideologically because cap-and-trade aims to introduce a free-market element – a trade in carbon credits - that appeals to conservatives while a carbon tax does not, placing the public good over other qualities, most especially business comfort. But sometimes ideology just skids away on oily tracks. We offer this preamble to bring you here : On the topic of carbon emissions, Smith advocates a straight carbon tax. “We would support, if the Congress in the United States wants to do it, a carbon tax,” he said, according to the Commercial Appeal. And who’s Mr. Smith? T...

From the NYT : Two senior House Democrats will unveil a 600-page draft global warming and energy bill today that they hope will prompt an intense round of internal negotiations, culminating with passage out of the Energy and Commerce Committee before June, according to several lawmakers and off-the-Hill sources briefed on the measure. The bill from Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Energy and Environment Subcommittee Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) includes four separate titles aimed at overhauling U.S. climate and energy policy, starting with a cap-and-trade program that sets mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades. Waxman and Markey – tough customers on nuclear, but there’s wind at the back of the solar radiance that is, uh, nuclear. So we’ll see. Here are some dates to put on your calendar: Waxman and Markey also unveiled a preliminary schedule for moving the legislation, starting with hearings on the bill during the week of April ...

Congress is barely grazing over the energy issues that will doubtless absorb them more as the year goes along, so we thought we wouldn’t be able to declare the outer limits of this debate for quite some time. By “outer limits,” we simply mean the most extreme position imaginable for or against an emerging policy. We may have found the outer limits on cap-and trade, per Smart Politics : “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people – we the people – are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country. And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States.” This is Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) (Smart Politics operates from the University of Minnesota). We’re genuinely surprised that anyone can gin up this level of rhetoric on cap-and-trade – m...

We're reminded of that reality by this story in the Des Moines Register, which looks at the candidates energy proposals from the point of view of Iowans. The focus is on cap-and-trade, which favors low carbon-emitting energy sources by making them the beneficiary of carbon "credits" which can be sold to high emitters until they get their act together: And those issues will determine how much more companies and consumers will have to pay for energy - and how soon their bills will rise - as well as what kind of energy they'll be using. Cap-and-trade will likely impose some pain in the pocketbook, although opportunities arise as well: Also at stake: Iowa's growing wind and biofuels industries. Making coal and gasoline more expensive to use will make wind power and biofuels more economically competitive. "Iowa is going to benefit from these things," said Jerald Schnoor, a University of Iowa researcher who chairs the Iowa Climate Change Adv...

Senator John McCain, in response to a question, made a curious comment about cap-and-trade yesterday: Sure. I believe in the cap-and-trade system, as you know. I would not at this time make those - impose a mandatory cap at this time. But I do believe that we have to establish targets for reductions of greenhouse gas emissions over time, and I think those can be met. We guess his idea is to get the EPA up to speed on administration and an infrastructure in place for auctions (if there are auctions – and assuming cap-and-trade eventually makes it through Congress – both McCain and Obama favor it), but it seems peculiar not to have the initial caps and a schedule for them in place when the program is ready to go. Otherwise, no market for carbon credits is created. We’ve noticed McCain’s penchant for comments so terse there may be nothing at all or a universe of detail behind them. It’s not a bad politician trick, and McCain may be trying to signal industry not to worry so much...

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the debate over how to constrain carbon emissions .