Welcome to your Friday Rundown, for the week ending March 8. I’m your driver, ClearPath Communications Director Darren Goode. Please let us know anything we missed at goode@clearpathaction.org. Thanks for reading and a special photo credit to DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy.
SENATE ENERGY APPROVES BARANWAL NOMINATION – AGAIN
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Thursday once again approved the nomination of Rita Baranwal to be the head the Department of Energy’s nuclear office, alongside other DOE nominees.
Baranwal’s extensive and senior nuclear policy experience includes as director of the Gateway for Acceleration Innovation in Nuclear effort housed at Idaho National Laboratory since August 2016. She was previously director of technology development and core engineering/nuclear fuel at Westinghouse Electric and a manager at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory.
The panel also forwarded to the full Senate the nominations of Bill Cooper to be general counsel, Chris Fall to lead the Office of Science and Lane Genatowski to head ARPA-E.
SPENCER’S TAKE
“Rita has an extensive background in both the private sector and at the national labs,” ClearPath Innovation Program Director Spencer Nelson said. “That includes spearheading DOE’s GAIN initiative, which works to make the department and national labs much more accessible to advanced nuclear companies. She would be able to start right away on achieving the president’s comprehensive nuclear energy policy review.”
SENATE ENR TAKES ON POWER SECTOR ROLE IN CLIMATE CHANGE
The Senate energy panel Tuesday held its first hearing exclusively focused on climate change in several years, although ClearPath Founder Jay Faison and others touched on the subject at an earlier Feb. 7 hearing on energy innovation.
“This has got to be a priority for all of us,” Chairman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said. Climate change is happening quickly in the Arctic and “directly impacting our way of life,” including loss of sea ice and permafrost, adverse economic impact on fisheries and changes in wildlife migration, she said. “So it is a very, very real condition and situation.” Solutions, she added, must be “reasonably policies that can draw bipartisan support.”
“The rhetoric surrounding the issue of climate and climate change can be so heated and so animated and so often times just a very toxic discussion that you cannot get to focusing on the solutions, on where we’re going on a positive way,” Murkowski said. The role her committee will clearly play is looking at current and future technologies, including carbon capture, advanced nuclear and storage.
There is more diversity in U.S. electricity supply than ever before, said former FERC Chairman Joseph Kelliher, now with NextEra Energy. While coal has dropped from 47% to 27.5% since 2005, natural gas rose from 22% to 35% and wind and solar quadrupled to 11%.
“One of the things I would encourage the committee not to do is prematurely limit options that are needed to address this issue,” echoed Susan Tierney, a former Department of Energy assistant secretary for policy under the Clinton administration.
ClearPath and the Department of Energy co-sponsored a discussion Thursday highlighting nuclear industry jobs – from engineers, geologists, machinists, welders, security officers to computer scientists.
“It supports an entire R&D infrastructure and community,” said Bo Feng, principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory, at the latest Atomic Wings briefing on Capitol Hill.
The nuclear industry will add 23,000 jobs over the next five years, on top of the 100,000 direct, long-term jobs and 475,000 secondary jobs currently in the sector, Nuclear Energy Institute senior director Carol Berrigan said.
Chris Colbert, chief strategy officer for small modular reactor developer NuScale Power, said his company could hire several thousands of workers to manufacture supply equipment, as well as constructing and operating plants for jobs that could exceed in income and availability for those workers who may be retired from current fossil fuel operations. “We are continuing to hire,” he said.
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) also highlighted nuclear power as part of “a sensible, realistic and effective policy vision to address climate change.” Nuclear’s zero-emission power represents more than 12% of Florida’s power generation, with the state’s three plants employing more than 1,600 skilled workers, he said. “We could create even more jobs all over the country,” especially if licensing and other requirements were better streamlined, he said.
RELATED VIEW
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute has a great new video out as part of its Energy Innovates series highlighting NuScale’s small modular reactor effort.
CARBON CAPTURE MUST BE PART OF ANY CLIMATE PLAN
ClearPath joined others in the broad Carbon Capture Coalition in urging congressional leaders to include carbon capture R&D “and commercial deployment as an essential component of a broader strategy” mitigating climate change.
“The good news is that the United States remains the global leader in carbon capture and storage, having successfully demonstrated the technology at commercial scale in multiple industries over the past half century,” the groups wrote. “We must do more to maintain that leadership.”
NEWS NUGGETS
FERC ahead of schedule Wednesday published the final rule that makes important changes to conduit hydropower projects Congress approved last year in bipartisan legislation (H.R. 2786) led by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.). Thanks to Hudson’s bill, qualifying conduit hydro can now be up to 40 MW, previously 5 MW, and the waiting period is down to 30 days from 45.
The Energy Department on Monday announced more than $5 million toward 45 undergraduate scholarships and 33 graduate fellowships for those who want to pursue nuclear engineering and other nuclear science degrees that are relevant to energy.
