Skip to main content

Guest Post: Alex Flint Introduces NEI's Congressional Resource Guide

By Eric McErlain
Alex Flint
The following guest post was submitted by Alex Flint, NEI's senior vice president, governmental affairs. 

One of NEI’s most important roles is ensuring that policymakers and their staffs have access to information they want about our industry. We pride ourselves in having on hand the technical expertise to answer any and all questions, and we are always willing to bring to Washington the experts with first-hand knowledge from our facilities.

But today, just having the information isn’t enough; we are also working to ensure that it is available whenever and however members and their staff want it. In past years, we would spend the first few months of each Congress delivering detailed three-ring binders to House and Senate offices. Those binders were crammed full of information about how reactors work, the uranium fuel cycle, and radiation, and included jobs and economic data broken down by state and district.
NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel

That's not how information works today. Members and their staffs don’t want information on our schedule; they want it on their schedule, and then they want it instantly. It is a Google world.

NEI's Congressional Resource Guide is our effort to respond to the new way Members and staff want information. We have organized it so that the issues we think policymakers may want are at their fingertips, and we will keep it constantly updated.

We’re not sure how this is going to be received. Some people appreciated the individual attention associated with sitting down to thumb through a binder, but we also know the majority of those binders were, shall we say, 'recycled.'


Let us know if the information we have posted is the right stuff – we’ve got plenty more where it came from – and let us know if making this information available on the web is enough. We want to meet your needs in this era of information overload, and your feedback is always appreciated.

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Alex for drafting this note to help us introduce our readers to the Guide. Below is a bulleted list of the main sections.

Finally, we also put together this short video with NEI's Staci Wheeler and Derrick Freeman to introduce the guide:

If you have any questions or comments about the Guide and its contents, please click here.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more

How Much Land Does Nuclear, Wind and Solar Really Need?

By
Not too long ago, we reviewed a report that looked at nuclear energy (and other energy sources) as biodiversity agents. This had to do, in part, with the amount of land a facility needs to function. Nuclear energy and fossil fuel plants use relatively little, wind farms and solar arrays quite a lot of land . Based on an objective and transparent analysis of our sustainable energy choices, we have come to the evidence-based conclusion that nuclear energy is a good option for biodiversity conservation (and society in general) and that other alternatives to fossil fuels should be subjected to the same cost–benefit analyses (in terms of biodiversity and climate outcomes, as well as sociopolitical imperatives) before accepting or dismissing them. Writer Barry Brook, who collected 75 scientists to endorse his paper, is interested in land use as it impacts flora and fauna. Biodiversity concerns do not get as much play as they might – and, when they do, it annoys many when land is withdraw...
4 comments
Read more