NEI Nuclear Notes

If you are in a lull at work or have time this afternoon, click here around 2 PM Eastern time to watch an oversight hearing titled “Nuclear Power’s Federal Loan Guarantees: The Next Multi-Billion Dollar Bailout?” The chair of the subcommittee that is holding the hearing is Mr. Kucinich from Ohio. NEI’s Leslie Kass will be testifying on the first panel along with former NRC commissioner Peter Bradford, IEER’s Arjun Makhijani, and Heritage Foundation’s Jack Spencer. Panel two includes a few familiar names as well: Mark Cooper and Richard Caperton among others. Pretty much everyone from all sides will be speaking at this hearing. The Q&A should be quite interesting, especially from the Chairman … Update 2:15: Well, it looks like we won't be able to watch the webcast after all. We were told that it's not working today and the committee will archive the video for viewing later this week. Update 4/21, 8:00 am: NEI's Donn Salvosa who was at the hearing said that it was l...

The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital blog has an interesting post of a debate between two environmentalists with, shall we say, divergent views of nuclear energy. As it happens, we attended the same debate and Nuclear Energy Overview, the weekly newsletter for Nuclear Energy Institute members, covered it. Here's some excerpts from that story, focused on Arjun Makhijani's comments: A debate last week at The National Press Club in Washington, DC, between two environmentalists – and newsmakers – laid out radically opposing views on commercial nuclear energy. One called it “inherently proliferation prone” and the other labeled it “one of the safest technologies ever invented.” The debaters were Arjun Makhijani, President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research , and Patrick Moore, Co-Chairman of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition ( CASEnergy ) and Co-Founder of Greenpeace . ... The cost of building nuclear ener...