NEI Nuclear Notes

Elizabeth McAndrew-Benavides and her husband watched John Edwards on Meet The Press on Sunday , and they weren't happy with what he had to say about nuclear energy and Yucca Mountain : My 30 year old Hispanic husband and I watched Tim Russert this past Sunday and were incredibly disappointed with the uneducated statement John Edwards made concerning Yucca Mountain. We are both nuclear engineers who are proud to work as environmentalist on a daily basis to supply the needed electricity for our country. I will gladly vote for a candidate who supports a national call for conservation, but I cannot support a candidate who does not understand the fundamental basis nuclear power supplies for our energy security. I became a nuclear engineer because I believe the millennia generation will need to do more than just debate the energy question, but constantly work to solve it. My husband and I help create an emissions free base load energy supply for millions of US citizens. Nuclear Power...

Presidential candidate John Edwards was endorsed by Friends of the Earth Action last Sunday primarily because of his stance against nuclear power . Mr. Edwards, accepting the endorsement, said: “I am opposed to the building of new nuclear power plants, which is different from the position taken by Senator Clinton and Senator Obama. FOEA’s president Brent Blackwelder had this to say: “Edwards is razor sharp and clear: we don’t want to go the route of nuclear power plants,” said Mr. Blackwelder, whereas Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted to explore the nuclear option. “We intend to run an independent campaign to educate the voters,” Mr. Blackwelder said. The canvassing, advertisements and seminars will take place mostly in New Hampshire , where the nuclear issue has resonance because of the nuclear power plant at Seabrook, as well as in other states. Educate the voters? I wonder if they’ll include these educational facts on nuclear in New Hampshire ? In 200...

MyDD has all the details. Click here for links to the interview. UPDATE : Here's the relevant segment of the transcript : MR. RUSSERT: Next stop is Nevada, January 19th. Big issue there is Yucca Mountain... SEN. EDWARDS: Yeah. MR. RUSSERT: ...the nuclear repository. You voted against making that a national repository, then you voted for making it a national repository, saying that... SEN. EDWARDS: And that’s starting to have a familiar ring. MR. RUSSERT: You voted—you voted for it before you voted against it. But the thing... SEN. EDWARDS: You said that, not me. MR. RUSSERT: But now you’re saying that maybe the nuclear waste should be stored locally where the waste was produced. Is that your position? SEN. EDWARDS: My position is that, that what’s happened with Yucca Mountain is there’ve been serious questions, including the, the possibility of lying and fraud in the scientific evidence of—that Yucca Mountain would work. I was always concerned, still am, about this nuclear waste...

Today was picture perfect for Newman Wachs Racing at the Harrah’s Autobahn Grand Prix Presented by Mazda. Atlantic Championship drivers John Edwards and Jonathan Summerton finished 1-2 for the first of two races this weekend at the Autobahn Country Club, which is just a short distance from the team’s headquarters in Mundelein. In front of the team’s friends, family members, and nearly 60 employees of team owner Eddie Wachs’ other companies, both drivers performed brilliantly and brought home the team’s first ever one-two result. And while this is good news for Edwards and Summerton (and Newman Wachs), why mention it here? Because both men were driving the Nuclear Clean Air Energy car, albeit minus a flux capacitor . Here is co-sponsor Entergy on the car: Entergy Nuclear is in its second year of the “Nuclear Clean Air Energy” campaign, having reached nearly two million people on the Atlantic Championship Series and across U.S. college campuses during that time. Our goal ...

After hearing John Edwards declare his outright opposition to nuclear energy during Tuesday's Democratic debate in Nevada, Adam Blinick of The New Republic wrote ... Gwyneth Cravens's illuminating Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy dispels many of the myths about nuclear energy that Edwards' position helps prop up. For example, she notes coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear ones. (In fact, humans get more radiation from medical x-rays or flying round-trip from New York to L.A. than living near a nuclear plant). Also, Cravens argues that nuclear energy plants are almost completely risk-free regarding nuclear weapons proliferation (it's a different enrichment process) and potential terrorist attacks (U.S. plants are simply too secure). She also makes the argument that we likely have safe ways of disposing of nuclear waste, even at Yucca Mountain. For all the empty "unity" rhetoric that inevitably is present during an election cycl...

In last night's CNN/YouTube Democratic debate , one questioner asked the candidates what they thought about increasing the use of nuclear energy as a way to provide affordable electricity while constraining greenhouse gas emissions and promoting energy independence. Here's how Senators John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton answered the question: This isn't the first time we've seen these candidates address the issue. For our file on Senator Edwards, click here . For Senator Obama, click here . For Senator Clinton, click here . UPDATE : There's some discussion of this particular question over at MyDD . ANOTHER UPDATE : More from The Daily Green . FINAL UPDATE : Some thoughts from NJ Business Matters . EVENING UPDATE : Some interesting thoughts from the Las Vegas Gleaner , while Common Dreams isn't happy with the proceedings at all.

When the sun makes energy through nuclear fusion, it has the benefit of not having to pay real cash for the energy expended to make more energy. Here on Earth, the effort to make fusion energy affordable and practical has been a lot tougher, though the payout is potentially so great – and the benefits manifest - that much effort has gone into it. Every now and then we get a peek into the fusion world, which is almost always almost ready to almost produce a plausible reactor. And this will happen – I’m sure of it – someday . To create fusion reactions , the NIF [National Ignition Facility] scientists fire lasers into a hohlraum, or a hollow cylinder made of gold. The laser pulses, lasting billionths of a second, hit a tiny sphere that is full of deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons). As the laser beams hit the hohlraum, the gold emits X-rays that are so powerful they vaporize the metal surface of the sphere. That vapor...

That Democratic Presidential debate on Tuesday night in Nevada keeps kicking up some dust. Here's USA Today : Yucca Mountain thus becomes the latest evidence of why it's so destructive to give a few early-voting states so much clout in the presidential selection process. Already this year, candidates have gone to Iowa and promised support for wasteful corn-based ethanol, and to Michigan and pledged fealty to the ailing auto industry. In both cases, candidates catered to a single state's interests by promising bad policy for the nation. Now Nevada joins the list. At Tuesday's debate in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards all vowed to block the remote Yucca Mountain site if they become president — but failed to offer any alternative except more study. In a singularly disingenuous bit of political jiu-jitsu, Edwards (who twice voted for Yucca Mountain) said he opposed using the site and then said he opposed building any more nuclear power plants becau...

Here's another YouTube find: Representatives from the Presidential campaigns of Senator Barack Obama, Senator John Edwards, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Senator John McCain all addressing where nuclear energy fits into their vision for future energy policy . The following was shot earlier this week at the National Press Club: Thanks to Climate Progress for the pointer.

Say hello to The Nautilus Forum . And thanks to them for digging up this clip of John Edwards stating his opposition to nuclear energy at a campaign event in South Carolina: Again, that's South Carolina, a state that gets 52% of its electricity from nuclear energy .

We're still waiting on a copy of the transcript, but Katie Fehrenbacher over at earth2tech is reporting on an interesting exchange between former U.S. Energy Secretaries from Day One at the Forbes Energy Conference . While [James] Edwards and [John] Herrington were riled up over cap and trade, [Spencer] Abraham 's biggest issue was actually with people who fight both climate change and nuclear power. It’s impossible to fight both, and nuclear will need to be a big part of the clean power equation, Abraham said.