1. Lawmakers should end wind subsidies
2. Yucca Mountain should be opened
3. Don’t be swindled by a solar energy scam this summer
4. Wind Farm pleads guilty in bird deaths
5. Poor pay the price for ‘green dreams’
6. Grid operator says EPA rule infeasible for Texas
7. TJC’s Energy Center to offer first power plant technology program
8. Huge solar plant lags in early production
9. Electric cars aren’t always very “green”
10. Report shows 1 in 3 Texans chooses renewable energy options
11. Second golden eagle in 3 years killed at Nevada wind farm
12. Natural gas, wind to take place of coal
13. Georgetown to switch from fossil fuels to solar, wind

If President Barack Obama is serious about green energy, he should stop punishing the only proven source of carbon-free energy — nuclear.

“The nuclear industry supplies 19 percent of America’s electricity needs,” explains the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Mario Loyola. “Nuclear energy is the only electricity source as cheap as coal, and it has zero carbon emissions. And yet the federal government has impeded the development of a healthy, competitive industry. As a result, though the U.S. has among the world’s largest uranium reserves, which just a few decades ago supplied nearly all of America’s domestic uranium needs, U.S. uranium producers now account for less than 5 percent of America’s needs.”

Part of the problem is that the agency which regulated the uranium industry is also its biggest competitor.

“Armed with enormous uranium inventories of its own, the Department of Energy has been ignoring federal law and driving America’s uranium producers to the brink of bankruptcy,” Loyola explains. “And that includes several Texas companies where hundreds of Texans work.”

The federal government has gotten into the uranium industry in a big way.

“As the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. agreed to take the excess uranium from old Soviet nuclear warheads and make it usable in civilian nuclear reactors,” Loyola says. “Together with uranium from a large number of decommissioned U.S. warheads, that left the Department of Energy with a large inventory of uranium to dispose of. Under federal law, the department is supposed to release its uranium over several decades. But the law prohibits ‘dumping’ uranium on the market if there will be an adverse impact on uranium prices. The law also requires that proceeds from the sale of taxpayer assets go to the general treasury to prevent agencies from cashing in on our assets to skirt the normal appropriations process.”

Not surprisingly, Loyola notes, “According to the Government Accountability Office, the Energy Department has been ignoring all of these legal requirements.”

The Department of Energy should stop competing with private industry and should stop dumping recovered Soviet uranium on the market.

That’s not all, however. The Obama administration should also lift the remaining roadblocks — political ones — standing in the way of opening Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste disposal.

Last fall, a long-delayed DOE report acknowledged that Yucca Mountain remains the best place to store such waste.

Joe Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the DOE report on years of scientific study offers further support of the suitability of Yucca Mountain as a permanent repository for used fuel from the nation’s commercial nuclear power plants and high level radioactive waste from the nation’s defense programs.

So what s the problem? Yucca Mountain is in Sen. Harry Reid’s home state.

Indeed, Reid has pledged it will never open, as long as he’s in power.

Well, now he’s not. The Senate is now in Republican hands. Still, even the Democrats in the chamber should support Yucca Mountain.

There’s no better option for disposal of nuclear waste, and there’s no other option for green energy.