President Trump’s two executive orders yesterday, aimed at streamlining permitting of oil and gas pipelines, are winning industry support. But they will likely face legal pushback from affected states and environmental groups. The New York Times wrote, “The actions are unlikely to have much of an immediate impact, but they will probably attract legal challenges … More Trump’s pipeline orders: Less than meets the eye?

While Pacific Gas & Electric is drawing most of the attention – and fire – for its role in devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018, it’s clear that this is a statewide problem, not just sloppy practices by an uncaring monopoly utility. The state’s other two investor-owned utilities – Southern California Edison and San Diego … More All Calif. utilities face fire liabilities

Westinghouse, the lead contractor in the collapsed V.C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina, has sued the statewide public power system Santee Cooper in Westinghouse’s bankruptcy proceeding, charging last week that Santee Cooper has been balking at selling millions of dollars of unused equipment at the failed, two-unit Westinghouse reactor construction.   The State newspaper … More The weird world of the V.C. Summer collapse

PG&E, in the midst of a nasty bankruptcy reorganization and major legal and political turmoil, has made a clean sweep of its top leadership. On Wednesday, the San Francisco electric and gas utility named Tennessee Valley Authority CEO Bill Johnson as the new CEO and president, while also unveiling a new board of directors. The … More PG&E picks Bill Johnson as CEO, names new board

Is the Trump administration secretly moving to allow Saudi Arabia to avoid U.S. nuclear non-proliferation law and policy in order to combine a civilian nuclear power program with a surreptitious nuclear weapons effort? Thanks to some intrepid reporting from the online news service the Daily Beast, we now know that the Department of Energy and … More US firms held secret nuclear meetings with Saudi Arabia

Today is the 40th anniversary of the nasty and iconic 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island Unit 2 nuclear plant outside Harrisburg, Pa., at the time the worst accident to occur at a light water reactor anywhere in the world. Ten years ago, at the 30th anniversary, I wrote a retrospective of my views … More Three Mile Island nuclear accident 40th anniversary

Two members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission today warned that a recent federal appeals court ruling involving the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management has important implications for FERC’s handling of environmental impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in natural gas pipeline and liquefied natural gas export cases. Citing a front page article in this … More FERC commissioners raise implications of Interior Department court ruling

“The time has come to sell Santee Cooper.” That statement by South Carolina Senate President Harvey Peeler, and a joint Senate-House resolution he introduced on Wednesday to give Gov. Henry McMaster authority to unload the 85-year-old state-owned generation and transmission system, presumably to a private investor, have revived what appeared to be dead a month … More Sale of S.C.’s Santee Cooper public power system resurfaces

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned all nuclear plant operators and managers to take more care in evaluating and documenting temporary alterations to plants “except those that have permanently ceased operations and have certified that fuel has been permanently removed from the reactor vessel.” In a five-page information notice dated March 12, the agency … More NRC flags problems with temporary plant alterations

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well. Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. Everything should be as simple as it can be, yet no simpler.” – -Albert Einstein Any journalist who has covered the … More NRC STEMwinder: acronyms, abbreviations, and plain language