By Kennedy Maize In a continuing reversal of long-standing policy, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed giving Wyoming the full authority to regulate dangerous and toxic coal ash disposal ponds and landfills in the Cowboy State. It’s the second state where EPA has told a state it can oversee how utilities handle coal ash, following … More EPA roundup: Coal ash reversal, meaty retreat, ambiguous court wins

By Kennedy Maize When the Tennessee Valley Authority announced this month that it had reached a mammoth deal — financial and timing details unspecified — to acquire 6GW of purchased power from an wide array of NuScale small modular reactors to be owned by ENTRA1–it produced some head-scratching. What the heck is ENTRA1? It’s not … More What the heck is ENTRA1?

By Henry Sokolski Last Monday, President Donald Trump pronounced “we can’t let nuclear weapons proliferate.” Two days later, Secretary of State Rubio met with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi and recommitted the United States to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. After America’s bombing of Iran’s suspect nuclear sites, there’s cause to take these commitments seriously … More Guest Commentary: Trump Wants to Stop Nuclear Proliferation; STRATCOM could play a major role.

By Kennedy Maize A long-running $800 million dispute between Michigan’s Consumers Energy and DTE Electric, joint owners of the 2,300-MW Ludington pumped storage hydro project, and Toshiba Corp. is headed to federal court on Oct. 28. The case involves a dispute over Toshiba’s rehab work on the elderly Ludington pumped storage hydro project, dating back … More Michigan utilities, Toshiba in $800M pumped hydro wrangle

By Kennedy Maize The U.S. Department of Energy has won a green light from the Environmental Protection Agency for construction of new space for nuclear waste storage at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico. WIPP is the government’s site for burying transuranic waste from the agency’s nuclear weapons program. WIPP began operations … More EPA okays DOE expansion of New Mexico nuclear waste project

By Kennedy Maize In his first seven months in office, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been betting on the weather using other people’s money without their consent. And losing. Last week (Aug. 20), Wright doubled down, ordering a Midwestern coal-fired power plant that he forced Consumers Energy to keep running in May on a speculative … More Chris Wright’s “Can’t Lose Casino” at work

By Kennedy Maize President Trump’s visceral dislike of “green” energy– particularly windmills, among other quirks he shares with Don Quixote – could backfire, raising consumer electric prices, according to two new studies from the Washington-based economic and energy think tank Resources for the Future. In “Hidden Costs of Repealing EPA’s Carbon Pollution Standards: Consequences for the … More RFF dissects Trump administration energy phobias and fallacies

By Kennedy Maize Could the failed V.C. Summer nuclear power plant project to add two 1,000-MW reactors to an existing site, with heavy federal subsidies, come back to life? The operating 966-MW Virgil C. Summer nuclear power plant, a Westinghouse pressurized water reactor that went into service on Jan. 1, 1984 at a cost (in … More Is it V.C. Summer time in South Carolina?

By Henry Sokolski and Sharon Squassoni In an apparent gesture of moderation, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, recently announced Tehran would renew talks with Washington. Gharibabadi made one seemingly reasonable condition: that the United States had to recognize Iran’s rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This is code for Iran insisting on its NPT “right” … More Guest Commentary: NPT does not guarantee a right to make nuclear fuel

By Kennedy Maize President Trump came into office mindlessly mouthing a fatuous slogan from prior Republican leaders, designed to win support from the oil industry: “Drill, Baby, Drill.” Casting a deep look at Trump’s meretricious meme, veteran oil industry consultant Michael Eisenband says, “Interestingly, to date, such efforts to spur more drilling have fallen on … More “Drill, Baby, Drill” a policy dry hole, an empty slogan