NEI Nuclear Notes

Details from Forbes .

Yesterday the New York Times took a look at proposals for carbon taxes . FuturePundit has some thoughts.

From the AP : BEIJING,: China will reject any agreement that calls for binding limits on carbon dioxide emissions that will replace the Kyoto Protocol, an EU official said Wednesday. Guido Sacconi, chairman of a visiting European Parliament delegation, said that was the impression he got after three days of talks in Beijing with government and environmental officials. "In the private meetings we have had, particularly with Chinese politicians, there were of course some differences of opinion," Sacconi, who heads the European Parliament's Temporary Committee on Climate Change, told a news conference. "The main difference is, unlike the European Parliament or the European Union, the Chinese believe that it will not be possible, in the agreement which follows the Kyoto Protocol, for China to accept any binding obligations — this was one difference between us."

From Energy Daily (Subscription Only): In next year's budget request, the Energy Department is planning to ask Congress for authority to take title to spent nuclear fuel stockpiled at closed U.S. nuclear plants and to reprocess it, most likely in France, sources tell The Energy Daily. DOE officials in recent years have resisted congressional pressure to move spent fuel stockpiled at U.S. reactors to regional storage facilities, saying the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) bars them from taking title to the fuel until the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada is granted a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license. Now, sources say, the department is planning to ask Congress to amend the NWPA to remove that limitation as part of its fiscal 2009 budget request to Congress, which DOE is in the early stages of preparing. However, DOE's goal is apparently to transport it for reprocessing, most likely at La Hague in France, not to move the spent fuel to regional storage facilit...

Gwyneth Cravens, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy , recently took a tour of the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant : By the end of the tour it became obvious to me that the slightest incident at a nuclear plant, even if it occurs far from any reactor and poses no risk to the public, is usually given three-alarm treatment by the media, whereas the large-scale, relentless, ongoing risks from fossil fuel combustion are ignored. Our biggest reliable sources of our basic electricity supply are fossil fuel plants and nuclear plants. There is nothing speculative about the fact that as coal combustion provides half of our electricity it causes the premature deaths of more than 24,000 Americans a year in addition to hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and heart disease. Is this acceptable? Nuclear power, while providing one-fifth of our electricity and three-quarters of our emissions-free electricity, has never caused a single death to a member of the American p...

From 24 Heures : Axpo is facing having to shut down two aging nuclear reactors at Beznau, while contracts for delivery of electricity from France are up for renewal. The country will have to find 2,000 megawatts of power to replace that lost from those sources. Karrer cited these figures as justifying the need for a new nuclear power plant. However, left-wing groups, who favor more energy conservation measures, are opposed to such a project because of concerns about nuclear waste. The country currently relies on nuclear power for 39 percent of its electricity needs. Sounds a lot like Germany , doesn't it?

Details from Marketwatch .