Yup, that's right. Three hundred million dollars. For a car battery. And yes, there's a catch.

[Today at Fresno State, McCain will] propose inspiring "the ingenuity and resolve of the American people by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars."

Newsvine http://www.newsvine.com/... posts an AP story from Atlanta about a hot-spot on a shipment from reactor manufacturer Areva NP Inc. registering radioactivity ten times that allowed by federal authorities.

The radiation was found on the bottom of a box of fuel cleaning equipment located on an open flatbed truck that made a seven-hour trip from Areva's Mount Athos Road facility near Lynchburg, Va. to the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant north of Chattanooga, Tenn.

The equipment arrived on Feb. 3. The next morning Watts Bar plant employees found a spot at the bottom of the truck they measured at 2,000 millirem per hour — 10 times higher than the commission's guidelines of 200 millirem per hour. A millirem is a unit of measurement of radiation. A chest X-ray usually is about 10 millirem, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

So I'm guessing the box wasn't very contaminated, it had just been sitting on a contaminated floor somewhere in Areva's Virginia facility. Hmmm. Don't suppose the dirty floor contaminated anything else in an industrial facility?

Fellow Kossacks,

Do we need a whole new generation of nuclear weapons?  Your very own U.S. Department of Energy thinks so.  Here at CREDO, we beg to differ.

Now, you might think that with a name like the "Department of Energy," they'd be looking into things like efficiency, solar, getting us off our oil dependency, etc. etc.  Well, think again!  

While there is a tiny bit of that work still going on by a handful of courageous souls at DOE...the really big money at DOE is all about the nuclear weapons programs.  Thinking about them, designing them, making them, maintaining them, trying to come up with possible uses for them, and dreaming about future generations of them...but unfortunately not so much about cleaning up their legacy.

Re-posting at the suggestion of a reader, and asking for your comments to the U.S. Department of Energy.  Comments must be received by April 29.  The subject line should read: "Scoping for the SPR EIS"  E-mail to donald.silawsky@hq.doe.gov

I came back to Mississippi to my family’s farm in 2000. We’re about 30 miles north of Biloxi, and just when I was getting used to living away from the big city, along came Katrina.  It was a big setback for this area, which has always been poor anyway.  The coming of the casinos to the Mississippi Gulf Coast made a big economic change, but the isolated, uneducated redneck culture persists.  Our land had been relatively uninteresting to developers; much of it remains in its natural state—natural, that is, post the massive harvest of the longleaf pine at the turn of the last century. People were not ready for the rape that is now upon us, not only by the developers, but now by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Currently, the island state of Hawaii gets more than 90% of its electricity by running large diesel generators - this leads to a very high cost for electricity, over $.20 per kWh.  Aside from being blessed for the natural beauty it's famous for, Hawaii is also blessed by an abundance of alternative energy options:

Wind
Solar (with lots of solar hot water already)
Geothermal
Ocean (Wave Power, Ocean Thermal Energy, Ocean Current)
Biomass

These features make Hawaii the ideal test bed for Freedom From Oil - join me over the fold for a peak at the positive developments there...

This diary is going to be an outline of US energy generation.

All energy activists...meaning all you opinionated folks here on the Dailykos who think you know something about energy production and consumption and who want to follow up on this by actual political activity: listen up.

The US Department of Energy has issued their reports on electrical generation for the year 2006 after totaling up all the information from utilities, generators, operators and other sources. The issue this report every October. Additionally, they issue tons of other reports you all ought to read. We'll examine some of them here. One of these reports is once called Cost and Performance Characteristics of the New Central Station Electricity Generating Technologies. That's a mouthful. It ought to be. It's the DOE's projection of "Overnight costs" by on dollars-per-Kilowatt installed. Some FASCINATING numbers. This is a report that projects out into the future and is supposed to be a guide for how much it would cost to build a new nuke, wind, solar thermal, hydro or hamster powered electrical generating station.

A girl can dream, can't she....Ah...let's just cut to the chase. Environmental news to use.

'Safe' uranium that left a town contaminated. They were told depleted uranium was not hazardous. Now, 23 years after a US arms plant closed, workers and residents have cancer - and experts say their suffering shows the use of such weapons may be a war crime. London Observer

N.J. may penalize utilities that pollute. New Jersey's lawmakers are poised to impose new pollution penalties on power companies -- the first step in determining who pays for contributing to global warming and who profits from preventing it. Bergen County Record

Corn ethanol goes from being a hero to a scapegoat. Opponents of the renewable fuel gain ground in arguing against an industry important to corn growers and state. Des Moines Register