NEI Nuclear Notes

IEEE has published a very strong account of the first 24 hours at Fukushima following the earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Japanese plant. Almost novelistic in depth, it is long and impossible to extract – well, not impossible, I just don’t want to. Read the whole thing here . Terrific job by Elizabeth Strickland. We’ll be seeing some official timelines on the accident before the end of the year – consider this a considerably fleshed out coming attractions trailer. --- The folks at IEEE have also put up an interesting if slightly misleading chart called Fukushima Daiichi’s Messy Future. It aims to show how the cleanup will go at the stricken Japanese plant at the 1 year, 10 year and 100 year marks. The misleading part is that setting the future at 10 and 100 years doesn’t really indicate when the cleanup or disposition of various components – reactor buildings, reactor cores, etc. – will be finished, only that they will be finished by then. Maybe this is fair enough ...

A lot of the posts over at the National Journal’s energy blog have been about Solyndra – as one might expect – but the loan guarantee aspect of the story has a nuclear energy angle. NEI President and CEO Marv Fertel explains (about a quarter of the way down the page): Loan guarantees are one of the most effective tools available to the federal government, and are widely used by the federal government to support financing of projects that have substantial public value. The federal government manages a successful loan guarantee portfolio of approximately $1.2 trillion which, on balance, returns more to the Treasury than it costs the taxpayer. Loan guarantees cost the taxpayers money when a company defaults. That’s collateral damage from the the Solyndra collapse, because the company had received one - with a good deal of fanfare. Why offer loan guarantee at all? Well, they lower the cost of a loan, making it more plausible for a company to risk the considerable cash needed to ...

At a press conference at NEI, Alex Flint, senior vice president for government affairs at NEI, discussed some priorities for the upcoming Congress. The question-and-answer session with reporters focused on several key issues affecting the nuclear energy industry: a clean energy standard, DOE loan guarantees, EPA water regulations, the Nuclear Waste Fund fee and a federal corporation for managing used nuclear fuel. A recurring theme was that nuclear energy could be an area for bipartisan cooperation on energy legislation in the new Congress. Original reporting from NEI’s Nuclear Energy Overview follows:  Nuclear energy might hold the key to a compromise on energy legislation in the next session of Congress, an NEI executive told reporters during a briefing on the impact of the midterm elections on the nuclear energy industry. “Nuclear energy is at the center of the debate about energy policy,” said Alex Flint. “We view it as the middle ground on which both parties can compromise...

It has been an exciting week in loan guarantees. Last Thursday, the U.S. Export-Import Bank decided not to provide loan guarantees to support the sale of $310 million in mining machinery by Bucyrus International, Inc ., to Reliance Power Ltd., of India. The sale was contingent upon the Indian firm receiving Ex-Im Bank-supported financing. The Ex-Im Bank said its decision was based on consideration of environmental impacts of the deal, as mandated by a carbon-intensity policy implemented this spring. The machinery was to be used to mine coal for a 3,960 megawatt power plant coming on line in 2012 and the Bank did not wish to promote the use of coal. The coal-fired plant would emit about 27,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Howls went up across the land citing negative impacts on the economy of Milwaukee and the U.S. The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce estimated that the Bucyrus sale would support over 300 jobs in the Milwaukee region and more than 650 jobs among s...

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...

On Monday, CAP attempted to provide some facts about DOE’s loan guarantee program that needless to say completely distorted the picture. After spending a few days dissecting their analysis, NEI came out with a 13 page response that rebuts CAP and clarifies the facts . Below the rest of this post are just a few snippets from our response. The Center for American Progress is openly and determinedly anti-nuclear and CAP’s recent paper reflects that anti-nuclear bias. Although it appears to be an objective discussion of credit subsidy fees, careful examination shows that the paper is built on mistakes and misstatements; unsubstantiated estimates of default probability and recovery rates; cost estimates of mysterious origin, lack of understanding about recent nuclear construction experience, and inaccurate descriptions of the DOE loan guarantee program requirements and project structures. An impartial observer could easily conclude that the Center for American Progress hopes to undermin...

Further to David’s post below, we thought we’d feature our old friends at FOE, that is, Friends of the Earth, using that discredited several year old default figure to gin up fear over loan guarantees. Frankly, the idea - to link them to bank bailouts - is a good way to make something rather abstract to the public seem really sinister – not to mention the use of music that seems to come from The Shining – but we think it’s for naught. Using nuclear plants as fear engines just isn't a very successful ploy anymore. As we usually find with FOE, the group does not really feel bound by truth and facts, preferring an approach driven by misinformation and fear. We really mean it: dislike nuclear energy to your heart’s content, but try to make your case with the best data possible and then put together scary ads. We still won’t agree, most likely, but we’ll respect you more. Really.

The Congressional Budget Office’s Director, Douglas Elmendorf , provided some important insight into how loan guarantees are assessed in the US government’s budget . For those who have been following the 50 percent default rate argument that nuclear critics have been making , CBO makes clear that the assumption of the rate in their 2003 report was for a piece of legislation that was never enacted. In the Director’s blog post , CBO basically says that there are numerous varying assumptions that go into assessing the credit risk of each project. But “without such information, much of which would be proprietary, CBO has no basis for estimating the cost to the government of any specific loan guarantee of this type. ” As said before and confirmed by CBO, no data exists to support the claim that 50 percent of new nuclear plants that are built will default. Perhaps the Director’s blog post puts this mis-understood claim to rest; somehow I don’t think so though…

The internet can be a bit, shall we say, free wheeling, so Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s Facebook page often finds itself awash in ill-considered comment. Or is it so ill-considered? Case in point: [Energy Secretary Steven] Chu posted information about $8 billion in loan guarantees awarded to two new nuclear reactors. The announcement spurred his “fans” to make more than 93 comments on nuclear energy, which would be great if it wasn’t just a hodgepodge of vacuous opinion and insults — entertaining as those might be. We’d only add that vacuous opinion aren’t limited to commenters on a Facebook page – it’s not as if cable news and op-ed pages are sterling repositories of intellectual purity – and as the story points out, some folks do bring some rigor to the discussion. Dr. Chu, congratulations on a good decision. However, I am concerned after reading the comments here that once again, not enough money is being spent on educating the public regarding the facts about nucle...

In what we might call a bid for equal time, we roamed around looking for some stories that took a more critical view of the Vogtle loan guarantees. It must have been irresistible to The New York Times to see how environmentalists reacted and turned up, among others, our favorite group for reliable nuclear trash talk : Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, whose political arm endorsed Mr. Obama’s candidacy for president, said that Mr. Obama’s recent policy emphasis amounted to “unilateral disarmament.” “We were hopeful last year; he was saying all the right things,” Mr. Pica said. “But now he has become a full-blown nuclear power proponent, a startling change over the last few months.” The Times’ John Broder points out that this really isn’t the case: Mr. Obama has long supported nuclear power, as a senator and as a candidate for president. That is the case. We would agree with Mr. Pica, though, that one might not have expected Obama to make quite such a ...