Posts Tagged ‘Department of Energy’
G.M. withdraws application for Energy Department Loan
General Motors said on Thursday that it was withdrawing its application to borrow $14.4 billion from a pool of federal money intended to help automakers build more fuel-efficient vehicles.
G.M., whose request had been pending with the Energy Department for 15 months, said the decision was based on improved cash reserves and a desire to avoid more debt. The company was profitable in 2010 and had $33.5 billion in cash and marketable securities as of Sept. 30 — much of it the result of federal loans related to its 2009 bankruptcy filing — up from $22.8 billion a year ago.
“This decision is based on our confidence in G.M.’s overall progress and strong, global business performance,” Christopher P. Liddell, G.M.’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “Withdrawing our D.O.E. loan application is consistent with our goal to carry minimal debt on our balance sheet…”
Congress created the $25 billion fund in 2008, and the Energy Department has lent about $8.5 billion of it so far. The Ford Motor Company received $5.9 billion — about half the amount it requested — with smaller amounts going to Nissan, Tesla and Fisker…
G.M. said that, even without the retooling loans, it had invested $3.4 billion in its American plants since emerging from bankruptcy, creating or retaining 11,000 jobs. Much of the upgrade was related to the manufacture of new high-mileage cars like the Chevrolet Cruze and Volt as well as batteries…
Separately Thursday, G.M. said it was accelerating the introduction of the Volt, a plug-in hybrid, in response to customer demand. Dealers in all 50 states will be able to take orders in the second quarter and start receiving the cars in the second half of the year. Previously, G.M. had said the Volt would not be available nationwide until mid-2012.
They’re also talking about doubling production of the Volt. Reception from retail customers has been better than anything they might have hoped for – at least what automotive journalists stuck into the carbon cycle thought they would get. 
Plutonium buried at National Lab is triple previous admissions
The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed.
The active phrase being “previously reported”. You can assume the DOE has been lying for decades.
Plutonium waste is much more prevalent around nuclear weapons sites nationwide than the Energy Department’s official accounting indicates, said Robert Alvarez, a former department official who in recent months reanalyzed studies conducted by the department in the last 15 years for Hanford; the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory; the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C.; and elsewhere.
But the problem is most severe at Hanford, a 560-square-mile tract in south-central Washington that was taken over by the federal government as part of the Manhattan Project. By the time production stopped in the 1980s, Hanford had made most of the nation’s plutonium…
The fear is that in a few hundred years, the plutonium could reach an underground area called the saturated zone, where water flows, and from there enter the Columbia River. Because the area is now arid, contaminants move extremely slowly, but over the millennia the climate is expected to change, experts say…
But more than 20 years after the Energy Department vowed to embark on a cleanup, it still has not “characterized,” or determined the exact nature of, the contaminated soil.
The department has been weighing whether to try to clean up 90 percent, 99 percent or 99.9 percent of the waste, but because the extent of contamination is unclear, so is the relative cost of the options.
In other words, the bureaucrats hope the problem will be dealt with – by someone else after they retire. Results were classified. Scientists were ordered for years to keep quiet or be arrested and charged with violating national security laws.
How many of those charged with the task have already retired? They’re sitting somewhere on their rusty-dusty laughing at the civilians who may yet acquire cancer and more – courtesy of our heroic foreign policy.
People wonder why I’m cynical about our politicians? I’m amazed we finally have an administration that let the truth out.
