What is NEI, and Why Do We Have a Blog?

Welcome to NEI Nuclear Notes, a new spot in the Blogsphere owned by the Nuclear Energy Institute, the Washington-based policy organization that represents the American nuclear industry. To keep things simple to start, here's our mission statement:

The Nuclear Energy Institute is the policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industry and participates in both the national and global policy-making process. NEI’s objective is to ensure the formation of policies that promote the beneficial uses of nuclear energy and technologies in the United States and around the world.

For those of you who might be wondering, I'm the same Eric McErlain who is responsible for Off Wing Opinion. Let's just say that after four years of sports blogging I thought it was time to take what I've learned, and apply it to weightier pursuits. And when I go to work at NEI, I feel like I get to contribute to a lot of worthwhile endeavors like energy security, environmental protection and economic growth.

Nuclear energy contributes to all of those goals, and we've got a positive story to tell that doesn't always get heard. Keep coming back, and my colleagues and I will show you.

As for me, I'll be limiting my posts to my specific line of work. For the past couple of months I've been distributing an e-mail newsletter to my colleagues in the industry, and I'll be migrating that content to NEI Nuclear Notes. You can also count on me to post links to breaking news when appropriate, but my most important task will probably be helping my colleagues at NEI dip their toes into the water when it comes to blogging.

And it's that prospect that folks ought to be excited about. Sure, during my tenure at NEI, I've slowly been turned into something of a policy wonk. But at the end of the day I'm still just a writer -- not a physicist, not an engineer and not an economist.

But we have all of those experts at NEI, and many, many more. Over the next few weeks and months, you'll start seeing posts from them, just the sort of people who have the specialized knowledge that can really make a blog come to life.

Now, I'm sure more than a few commercial nuclear energy veterans might be wondering how we're going to handle all of the myriad issues inside our industry with just one Blog. The answer is we can't, and we won't try. There are any number of issues in our business -- Yucca Mountain just for starters -- that could occupy a massive Blog on all their own.

So think of NEI Nuclear Notes as a test bed where we'll find out just who inside our organization, and perhaps eventually inside our member companies, works best in this new medium.

Thanks to Skip Bowman, our President and CEO and Scott Peterson, our Vice President of Communications, for giving us the green light for this project.

So come back soon. We've got some interesting things to talk about.