NEI Nuclear Notes

A couple of major editorials take a look at President Obama’s energy-related nominations to his cabinet: Ernest Moniz for Energy Secretary and Gina McCarthy for EPA Administrator. These are not specific to energy generation or even to the nominees, really, zeroing in on climate change mostly, but it never hurts to see if nuclear energy gets a shout out – or just shouted at. Here’s the Times’ view. It opines that Congress is unlikely to move on climate change legislation and continues: This means that his second-term agenda on climate change will run through Ms. McCarthy’s and Mr. Moniz’s agencies, and will depend almost entirely on executive actions that do not require Congressional approval. Here are three strategies that could make a big dent in carbon emissions.  Just three? You’ve got to start somewhere. They are: Use the Clean Air Act to limit pollution (good for nuclear); Make natural gas safer (neutral); Improve energy efficiency across the board (also neutral). A...

Entergy's Bill Mohl Earlier today, William (Bill) Mohl, President, Energy Wholesale Commodities, Entergy Corporation, testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee 's Subcommittee on Energy and Power. His testimony was concerned with why it was important for the nation to maintain a diverse portfolio of energy sources. We've excerpted a couple of passages from the speech below ( bold emphasis mine ): Another way of looking at the economic value of existing U.S. nuclear generation is to consider the potential cost of replacing it. Based on data publicly available from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Entergy has calculated that building gas-fired Combined-Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plants to replace the approximately 101,000 megawatts of capacity provided by U.S. nuclear plants would cost between $100 and $110 billion dollars . An investment of this magnitude to replace an existing asset class would be enormous for the U.S. power industry. T...

If you want a sense of what Ernest Moniz, the MIT physicist who is President Barack Obama’s pick for energy secretary , thinks about nuclear energy, read some of his writing. There’s a lot of it, and he’s pretty direct : It would be a mistake, however, to let Fukushima cause governments to abandon nuclear power and its benefits. Electricity generation emits more carbon dioxide in the United States than does transportation or industry, and nuclear power is the largest source of carbon-free electricity in the country. Nuclear power generation is also relatively cheap, costing less than two cents per kilowatt-hour for operations, maintenance, and fuel. Even after the Fukushima disaster, China, which accounts for about 40 percent of current nuclear power plant construction, and India, Russia, and South Korea, which together account for another 40 percent, shows no signs of backing away from their pushes for nuclear power. This is from November 2, 2011. A little more: Nuclear power...

You just knew it would happen: after Georgia Power announced it would take another year to bring the two new reactors at Plant Vogtle online, the Associated Press intoned : As the cost of building a new nuclear plant soars, there are signs of buyer's remorse. See last week’s post below this one about the “soaring costs,” I was interested to read where the buyer’s remorse was coming from. The main source would be Georgia Power or its parent, Southern Co., right? Not a word about any such remorse here. Well, then, who or what does the article have weeping brokenly? [A] Georgia lawmaker sought to penalize the company for going over budget, announcing a proposal to cut into Southern Co.'s profits by trimming some of the money its subsidiary Georgia Power makes. The legislation has a coalition of tea party, conservative and consumer advocacy groups behind it, but faces a tough sale in the Republican-controlled General Assembly. GOP Rep. Jeff Chapman found just a single co-spo...

The two reactors at Georgia’s Plant Vogtle will be delayed about a year and cost $381 million more than originally planned. Is this disappointing? A bit – I’m eager to see these up and running, but the years, they do speed by, don’t they? 2017 will be here soon enough. Certainly, though, another year of work means ratepayers are on the hook, right? No, it doesn’t seem so. The truth of another year is that it does not represent a major issue for the ratepayers. But the company’s analysis continues to show that adding more nuclear energy to Georgia Power’s portfolio would be a better deal for customers by $4 billion over the life of the plant than any other available energy source, said Buzz Miller, Georgia Power’s executive vice president for nuclear development. “We have a very good project for our goals of building it right with quality and compliance ,” he said. And happily, Georgia Power has some options. Miller said the additional costs will be offset by fed...

The other day I mentioned that electricity seems more a human right than anything else and if it has to be generated by coal, natural gas or nuclear energy – or any other source – countries that want to electrify will do what they feel they have to do. But I wondered if I could offer a recent experience of this kind as an example – with a nuclear angle. Yes, sort of. A better example would be about a place with a considerable number of people without electricity. That’s not true of Thailand. But let’s see where this takes us. It starts with a story in the Thai Times The Thai National Shippers’ Council (TNSC) proposed nuclear power as an alternative energy solution to protect the country’s economy from future risk of power disruption. Power disruption! Even countries with electricity cannot always rely  on it and not being able to rely on it is almost as bad as not having any. And to the Shipper’s Council , it’s clearly untenable. The story that follows doesn’t reall...

The following is a guest blog post submitted by Ellen Ginsberg, vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Nuclear Energy Institute. On March 1, 2013, the federal District Court of Arizona will hear oral argument on the NEI’s pending motion for summary judgment in its challenge to the Secretary of Interior ’s withdrawal of over one million acres of public lands in Northern Arizona, including promising uranium deposits, under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (“FLPMA”). NEI, joined by the National Mining Association , has argued that the Secretary of Interior lacked authority for the withdrawal in light of an unconstitutional legislative veto in the provision of FLPMA relied upon by the Secretary in issuing the withdrawal. The government has already conceded that the provision’s legislative veto is unconstitutional, leaving to be decided whether or not the remainder of the provision and the Secretary’s authority to issue such large-scale withdrawals survive...