NEI Nuclear Notes

In writing about Venezuela’s nuclear energy ambitious, I wondered what the U.S. response would be. Now we know : "We have no incentive nor interest in increasing friction between Venezuela and the US, but we do think Venezuela needs to act responsibly," [President Barack] Obama told Spanish media at the White House. "Our attitude is that Venezuela has rights to peacefully develop nuclear power," he said, adding that as a signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty it must also meet its obligations not to weaponize those systems. So there you go. And Venezuela is moving right along: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez clinched a deal in Moscow on Friday that will see Russia build and operate the first nuclear power plant in his country. You can read the rest of the story for more. --- Former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman weighs in on the renewable electricity standard, which will require that utilities get a percentage of their power fr...

File it under “Another Country Considers Nuclear” – but with an asterisk this time: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Monday that his government is carrying out initial studies into starting a nuclear energy program. Chavez brought up the issue during a news conference, saying the South American country needs an atomic energy program. And this isn’t necessarily diabolical. For all that Chavez is viewed as a bad actor, Venezuela certainly needs more electricity and while almost totally dependent on renewable energy sources (62% hydro, 38% thermal), these are tapped – like Venezuela, Brazil has also turned to nuclear energy because it cannot further grow its hydro capacity. Venezuela is largely an urban nation, with 86% of its 26 million people clustered into cities. So a nuclear energy plant could bolster its capacity rapidly – and it needs it; Chavez declared a state of emergency earlier this year after a drought hampered its hydro capabilities. As a result of th...

More bad news for American and its allies from the WSJ Energy Blog : OPEC, meet Opegasur. That’s the name of a new natural-gas cartel established this morning in an agreement between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Argentina’s President Nestor Kirchner . Opegasur, which stands for Organizacion de Paises Productores, Exportadores de Gas del Sur, will also include Brazil and Bolivia. It will be built around a $20 billion gas pipeline that will eventually connect the four countries. There has been talk that the natural-gas cartel might never get off the ground. But it may not be long before an even bigger — and scarier, to U.S. interests anyway — cartel takes shape, Michael J. Economides, editor-in-chief of Energy Tribune, warned recently on Foreign Policy’s Web site . “With domestic gas production in decline, the United States and many of its allies will grow more dependent on imports to generate electricity and heat homes,” he wrote. “Gas suppliers will band together in response t...

After the breakup of Standard Oil, the seven companies that dominated global oil production became known as the " Seven Sisters ". Yesterday, via the WSJ Energy Blog , we learned that the Finanical Times has designated seven new members of the sisterhood -- and the implications for the free world are rather alarming: The new Seven, per the FT, are Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom, CNPC of China (parent of PetroChina), NIOC of Iran, Venezuela’s PDVSA, Brazil’s Petrobras and Petronas of Malaysia. All are state-controlled. A few are owned by governments that are less-than-friendly, if not downright hostile, toward the U.S. Many are flexing their “resource nationalism,” wresting control of lucrative oil and gas projects from foreign companies, including the old Sisters. Together, the FT points out, the new Sisters control more than 10 times the oil reserves of the old Sisters. They produce more than twice as much oil as the old Sisters. The new Sisters only lag the old Sisters in...