Department Of Energy

If You Don't Believe In Global Warming, Please Forward This to Your Friends Who Do

Inherited these kinds of problems from the prior generation and shuffling them to the next generation.

Pop quiz:

Q. What is the fiscal multiplier on $529 in government stimulus?

A. If you are Fisker Automotive, zero.

While the terminal fate of the federally-subdizied car company was no secret to anyone, there were some questions when this latest example of idiotic government "capital allocation" would get Solyndraed. The answer is now.

I've got that whiff of rotten eggs again.

We Could Offset the Need for the “Sequestration” Budget Cuts By Stopping Nuclear Subsidies

The budget for "rat fees" comes to $125m.

And now for a quick lesson in government spending: in the 1940s the federal government created the now mostly decommissioned Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. During the Cold War, the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Sadly, many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents have since confirmed that Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River. The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons of high-level radioactive waste, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater beneath the site and occasional discoveries of undocumented contaminations that slow the pace and raise the cost of cleanup. The Hanford site represents two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup. The government spends $2 billion each year on Hanford cleanup — one-third of its entire budget for nuclear cleanup nationally. The cleanup is expected to last decades. It turns out that as Krugman would say, the government was not spending nearly enough, and moments ago Governor Jay Inslee said that six underground radioactive waste tanks at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site are leaking.

While it is now unanimous that Solyndra just won the funniest ad of the Superbowl by a mile, while we await for electricity to return to the Superdome (a stadium which has seen some $471 million in taxpayer funds since Katrina, and apparently not nearly enough) as the Boeing battery used to power up Super Bowl 47 is replaced, we wish to bring to our readers this message of supreme ironic poetry delivered by none other than the US Department of Energy.

The quest for cheap energy and cheap labor is a conquering human urge, one that has played out with notable ferocity starting with the Industrial Revolution. The introduction of coal into British manufacturing, and the more recent outsourcing of Western manufacturing to Asia, have marked key thresholds in this ongoing progression. But despite the harvesting of additional productivity gains from the more recent revolution in information technology, the suite of macro data suggests that the rate of advancement in physical production has slowed, notably, in the past thirty years. Seen in this light, the greatest gains to global industrial production were probably enjoyed from the late 18th century (when coal extraction and use began in earnest) into the mid-20th century (when oil reached broad distribution). In contrast, computers, the Internet, and the leveraging of developing world labor might eventually be seen as the finishing touches on this great industrial wave.

Buried deep in the bowels of the much-heralded last-minute fiscal-cliff deal, that saved us from a fate worse than death and raised taxes on 77% of Americans, was a quiet little provision, inserted at the last minute, that sharply slashed Medicare payments to brain-tumor radiation provider Elekta by 58% while leaving its main competitor Varian's payments unchanged. As the WSJ reports, the provision was put through by none other than Harry Reid - who has a 'deep relationship' with Varian (the winner). Whether crony capitalism is alive-and-well is up for debate - as Varian suggests this 'levels the playing field' but it is the fact that Varian beefed up its outside lobbyists to 18 (from 10) and the provision was not added until the last day suggests this stinks. Once again, it appears, our government is picking winners - and losers (with Elekta as a foreign company unable to participate financially in American elections). As the WSJ notes, the insert looks like the kind of provision helping a specific company or industry that lawmakers have repeatedly vowed to halt. Nonetheless, even in the budget bill tackling the so-called fiscal cliff, lawmakers found time to craft such provisions.

Department of Energy Wants to Let Radioactive Scrap Metal Back into Consumer Products

Your comprehensive yet concise, one-stop summary of all the bullish and bearish events of the past week.

Right now the world produces more Oil than it consumes each day, and it has for the past 16 months, this trend will only get worse in 2013.

At a cost to the taxpayer of $317,435 per job

The US Department of Energy has just released their latest storm damage report for Sandy and it does not make for good reading. Over 50% of New Jersey residents remain without electricity and almost 2 million people in New York state alone. Port Reading (Hess) and Linden (Phillips) refineries remain shutdown (about 308,000 barrels per day or 26% capacity offline), and 3 nuclear sites (Salem, Indian Point, and Nine Mile Point) remain offline and many of the others are at dramatically lowered output (only 52% of capacity online!). Not good...