- The Los Angeles Times: 4 years after Fukushima, Japan considers restarting nuclear facilities
POLITICO Morning Energy for 3/30/2015
By DARIUS DIXON, with help from Alex Guillén
PONDERING THE END OF THE AGE OF REID: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s announcement Friday that he won’t run for re-election in 2016 is sending out political and policy ripples. He’s still planning to lead Senate Democrats until January 2017 but for his allies, the news signals the end of an era. And for his critics, it’s Morning in America. Despite being so soft-spoken, the Nevadan has exercised a brutal tongue. He also took such a special interest in energy policy — we’ll get to that, of course — that it will be fascinating to see where Sen. Chuck Schumer puts his fingerprints in his rise to Democratic leader.
Fair warning, Dear Reader, this edition of Morning Energy is rather Reid-rich. Please consult your physician if you’re concerned about such a large dose.
INSIDE SCHUMER’S 24-HOUR CAMPAIGN FOR LEADER: From our colleagues Manu Raju and Burgess Everett: Late Thursday night, the Senate was moving through an endless series of budget votes. Senators were sitting at their desks chit-chatting. Others were watching NCAA basketball in the cloak room or checking the latest news on their iPhones. Sen. Chuck Schumer was in Sen. Harry Reid’s office, the two of them choked up and nearly in tears. Reid dropped the bombshell news that would soon reshape Democratic politics in Washington and Nevada: He would retire at the end of the current Congress in early 2017. http://politi.co/1Cn724M
ON ENERGY ISSUES —
YUCCA GOES WITH ME INTO THE SUNSET: Harry Reid is heading off into the sunset, and the Nevada Democrat wants to take the controversial Yucca Mountain project with him. “Yucca Mountain is dead. It will never be a high-level nuclear repository,” Reid said on Friday during a radio interview, after announcing he won’t run for another term in 2016. “People should just get a new life,” he added. “It’s not gonna happen.”
Reid says that a firewall against Yucca Mountain will exist even once he’s left office, citing similar sentiments among top Democrats. “The next president of the United States is going to be Hillary Clinton,” he said confidently on Friday. “Her husband, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, they’ve all said, ‘No Yucca Mountain.’ There’s going to be no Yucca Mountain.” And GOP presidential hopefuls aren’t exactly rushing to support the project either, thanks in part to Nevada’s early caucus test in the race. Alex Guillén has more: http://politico.pro/1F7iAdv
REID’S ENERGY ‘VACUUM’ WILL BE HARD TO FILL: Reid’s retirement will leave a void not just in his party’s Senate leadership but in the national debate on nuclear power, fossil fuels and modernization of the electric grid — and will cost environmentalists a crucial ally in Washington. More than most congressional leaders before him, the Nevada Democrat used his power both on Capitol Hill and as the builder of one of the nation’s most dominating statewide political machines to influence federal energy policy.
As the leader of a Democratic Senate supermajority early in President Barack Obama’s first term, Reid steered an unprecedented tens of billions of dollars in clean energy investments through the federal stimulus program, helping spur solar, wind and geothermal projects in his state. He denounced “clean coal” even before Obama began backing away from the technology, expressed “serious concern” about the Keystone XL oil pipeline before it was on most Democrats’ political radar, and hosted an annual clean energy summit in Las Vegas that drew the Clintons, Cabinet members and stars from the tech industry. Darren Goode and Elana Schor have more: http://politico.pro/1IIh4zw
HAPPY MONDAY. I’m Darius Dixon, your morning host, and this week’s “Saturday Night Live” justifies my habit of setting low expectations so that I can be pleasantly surprised on the regular. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had a couple of amazing skits. This one is getting the most play: http://bit.ly/1BU2gYX. But Mrs. ME and I agree that this is the winner: http://bit.ly/1HVKNaC. Send your energy commentary, news, scoops and tips to ddixon@politico.com, and follow us on Twitter @dariusss, @Morning_Energy and @POLITICOPro.
BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS are out of town for a two-week Easter/Passover recess so congressional staff get to come to work in jeans. They’ll be back April 13.
SEC TO COURT — WE’RE TOO BUSY TO WRITE DISCLOSURE RULE RIGHT NOW: The SEC told a federal court in Massachusetts Friday that it probably won’t propose a new Dodd-Frank rule requiring energy and mining companies to disclose payments made to foreign governments until spring 2016, pushing back its most recent estimate by another half-year at least. Oxfam America’s suit seeks to force the SEC to propose a so-called Section 1504 rule more quickly than that, but the agency told the court that it has been delayed because of “the unprecedented volume of rulemaking” required by Dodd-Frank and the JOBS Act. The SEC also noted that the first version it wrote was vacated by a federal judge in 2013, and argues that it is owed deference in determining how to use its “finite resources in order to fulfill its law enforcement and other competing regulatory obligations.” Filing: http://politico.pro/1bItj4d
CALLING ALL REGULATION NERDS: The Pro Energy team’s Erica Martinson has pulled together the world of energy regulation into the latest edition of her bi-weekly tipsheet: http://politico.pro/19kJkfe
LET ME MAKE A COUPLE OF OBSERVATIONS, REID EDITION —
ON YUCCA: Despite what Reid has consistently said about Yucca Mountain’s demise over the years, his plans to step down are what the project’s supporters have been praying for. Reid’s play was decades in the making, and in 2012, Reid said he patiently “waited around like the tortoise” for an opportunity to stop the project, according the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He wound his way into a party leadership filled with lawmakers angling to get Yucca Mountain open — particularly Dick Durbin and Patty Murray — before essentially breaking both its legs, stabbing it in the back and leaving it for dead. But no one should expect its supporters to allow the Nevada Democrat get the last word. And with Reid eventually out of the way, Nevada loses its seniority. GOP Sen. Dean Heller has been in Congress for less than a decade and he’s the next-longest serving member of the state’s delegation but he nevertheless has to become its new one-man anti-Yucca army. Still, Reid has been an effective boogie man for Yucca supporters: He was behind every rock, under every bed and in every closet. Anytime the NRC does or doesn’t do something on Yucca, everyone sees Reid. When DOE visits Yucca, everyone sees Reid. Every nominee is viewed with suspicion. And they’re probably right. But the math of 49 states against one hasn’t changed.
An expert critical of Yucca once told ME that the main reason the site is still on the table was its “incumbency.” But the potency of being the incumbent can’t really be ignored. The abrupt way in which the program was drained of funding five years ago dispersed personnel, and left things in a state that, GAO said in 2011, “make the shutdown difficult to reverse.” Yet, after spending $15 billion and studying the site for more than two decades — no matter how ill-conceived the selection process became in the 1980s — lawmakers in both parties are loath to say that it was all for nothing and start again from scratch. Nuclear Energy Institute chief Marv Fertel crystallized what Nevada and its delegation are up against when he spoke to reporters in 2012: “I wish [Reid] no ill will — but the two things I’m sure of is that both the waste and the mountain are going to be there a long time.”
Many have forgotten that the Nuclear Waste Policy Act envisioned the government first creating nuclear waste repository in the West before creating a second one in the East. The latter was so steeped in controversy that it was quickly scrapped and all the weight fell to one site after Congress short-circuited the selection process ostensibly to save $3.9 billion — a fraction of what it will eventually cost. As Congress went about selecting Yucca as the nation’s first nuclear waste site in 1987, Reid, then in his first year in the Senate, called the decision “oppression and colonialism” and said it reflected “the ugly excesses of the McCarthy era.” What seems ironic in retrospect is that in the same December 1987 floor speech, Reid said, “What we have seen the last few weeks is neither idealistic nor moral, but it is an example of raw power.” And to undo such raw power, Reid’s takeaway was that he had to exercise his own.
ON FERC: Reid shocked FERC World as he sought to replace Jon Wellinghoff, a Nevadan close to the senator, especially when he openly sniped at Cheryl LaFleur, the acting Democratic chairwoman at the time. Particularly vexing was Reid’s accusation last year to The Wall Street Journal that LaFleur was undoing some of Wellinghoff’s “stuff” — measures that she had voted for and has largely sought to defend. It was hard to see why Reid was interested in FERC at all. So, it was former Reid energy adviser Chris Miller who offered ME some useful insight on this last year, saying that Reid’s interest was two-fold: consumer protection and fair markets, and a frustration with the electric grid in Nevada, and in the West generally.
Miller said Reid’s interest in FERC stretched back to Enron’s manipulation of power prices in California. “Obviously, California was the big kahuna, but Nevada ratepayers got slapped pretty hard by that too,” said Miller, adding that it helped explain Reid’s interest in now-incoming FERC Chair Norman Bay, who spent his time as FERC’s enforcement chief going after companies accused of manipulating the energy markets. Miller suspected that there wasn’t personal animosity toward LaFleur and recalled showing Reid maps of transmission development in the West years ago, and “it looked an awful lot like Nevada was becoming the doughnut hole” that would make it difficult to get the renewable energy projects Reid wanted to see going up in his state. That’s probably why Reid has insisted so strongly on putting a Westerner like Bay, a New Mexican, in the top slot at FERC. For a bit more on this: http://politi.co/1DiazVz
ONE LAST THING ON REID: POLITICO ran a story (http://politi.co/1xqTUwt) on Friday listing ten insults the senators has lobbed over the years and I’m not sure how they missed the time he called a former NRC commissioner a “miserable liar,” a “sh– stirrer” and a “first class rat.” http://politico.pro/1eiLuvj
QUICK HITS
— Foes question Christie’s shift on clean energy. The Washington Post: http://wapo.st/1GFFnyV
— Northeast, despite highest gas costs, resists more pipelines. The Associated Press: http://apne.ws/1EnjdCd
— Obama golfs with Halliburton director, Houston Astros owner. The Associated Press: http://bit.ly/1Mlmsyd
— Media Contributing to ‘Hope Gap’ on Climate Change. Climate Central: http://bit.ly/1a933zH
— Nation’s biggest nuclear firm makes a play for green energy money. The Associated Press: http://hrld.us/19kB92x
— Capitol Crude digs into the impact crude oil futures markets are having on US energy policy. Platts: http://bit.ly/19lkwny
— Duke Energy CEO Loses $600K in Pay Over Coal Ash Pollution. The Associated Press: http://abcn.ws/19kDiLH
Tags: climate, energy, fuel, gas