The NEI Afternoon Clip File

Here are some of the news clips we're reading at NEI this afternoon.

The price of crude oil rose more than $1 a barrel today, to more than $61 a barrel, after the death of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd. The nation's oil policy is not expected to change now that power has shifted to his brother, Crown Prince Abdullah.

Analysts said King Fahd's death was unlikely to affect oil supply from Saudi Arabia and the impact of the news was expected to be temporary. Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Britain, Prince Turki bin al-Faisal, said the nation wouldn't change its policy on oil or other matters.

"The Saudi oil policy was, still, and will be based on the balance between the interest of the domestic economy and the interest of the world economy," Alhajji said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman is visiting the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex today. This is his first visit to both Tennessee facilities.

Forbes reports that the energy bill is having a positive effect on the stock market:

Merrill Lynch said that the outlook for electric utilities continues to rise.

"For a sector that is up 15% year-to-date, last week brought another round of positive news." The research firm referred to the new Energy Bill which was passed by Congress. "Key benefits for the sector include the long-awaited repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act and a host of tax incentives for new investment in transmission, distribution, pollution-control equipment, clean-coal, renewables, and nuclear plants." The Act had limited merger and acquisition moves for utility firms and enabled oversight status to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Pollution Engineering weighs in on the proposed International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France:

The advantage of nuclear fusion over the current technology would be a cleaner process. Enriched uranium would not be the primary fuel and plutonium would not be the result. The process basically pushes atoms of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) together to form helium, releasing huge amounts of energy. The deuterium is extracted from seawater, which makes up about 75 percent of the Earth's surface.

Ian Fells, of the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain and an expert on energy conversion, described the project as a huge physics experiment. "If we can really make this work, there will be enough electricity to last the world for the next 1,000 to 2,000 years. So it is really quite important but quite difficult to do it," Fells said.

Come back tomorrow morning for more news from the NEI Clip File.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics