By Jason K. Chen, Carrots & Sticks Project Climate Intern
cross-posted on the Carrots and Sticks Blog

Two bills were discussed in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on December 15th, S. 2052 (Nuclear Energy Research Initiative Improvement Act of 2009, M. Udall) and S. 2812 (Nuclear Power 2021 Act, Bingaman). S. 2052 is a bill to amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to require the Secretary of Energy to carry out a research and development and demonstration program to reduce manufacturing and construction costs relating to nuclear reactors. S. 2812 is a bill to amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to require the Secretary of Energy to carry out programs to develop and demonstrate 2 small modular nuclear reactor designs.

As I was waiting in line, I noticed that there were a couple of colonels waiting in line behind. I do not know why the military had an interest in this hearing, but I thought it was something interesting to note.

The first guest was Dr. Warren “Pete” Miller who is the assistant secretary of the Office of Nuclear Energy at DOE. His main point, which was later repeated multiple times by the other panelists, was that modular reactors present many advantages over large reactors. Some of them being that they are much cheaper to construct, their fabrication is quicker due to their simplicity, they can be constructed in more off grid locations and that there is a large market for them.

Dr. Tom Sanders, the president of the American Nuclear Society, further added that 80% of the world’s grid cannot absorb large reactors and therefore shows a growing international market for small reactors. He stated that we can be the head of this nuclear technology as long as we have the collective will.

The third guest was Mr. Tony Pietrangelo, the senior vice president and chief nuclear officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute. He stated that one of the focuses of his organization is the safe operation of nuclear plants, specifically large scale reactors. This is due to the fact that large scale reactors already have licenses. However, he did mention that there is a growing demand for small scale reactors. Another point he made was that government industry partnerships are required if we want small reactors to be built in a short time frame. They are eager to work with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on implementing new designs, but there would be regulatory issues to work out.

The fourth guest was Mr. Michael Johnson, the director of the Office of New Reactors of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He also mentioned that large reactors have higher priority than small reactors. He later added that the speed which new designs can be licensed is determined on how much detail companies can give to the NRC.

The entire feeling of the hearing was that everyone was in favor of small nuclear reactors and wanted to speed up the process of implementing them. Sen. Murkowski asked the panelists to explain what the largest hurdle was for going forward with small reactors. The panelists concluded that commitment was the ultimate impediment.

Sen. Burr and Sen. Landrieu were critical on how structural regulations were slowing down everything. Furthermore, Sen. Landrieu stated that they should invest more money into this area because it shows a lot of potential in creating jobs.

Sen. Barrasso was focused on an issue completely separate from all the others. He was expressing his criticism to the DOE over a management plan regarding the sale of uranium and how this plan has dropped the price of it. Furthermore, he stated that this price drop has affected mining activities in Wyoming. He seemed to be mainly focused on issues pertaining to his own state.

The last point the panelists made was that the process of implementing small reactors will accelerate after the first one is implemented.

Here’s an update to what’s new on GovTrack over the last few months.

• You’ll now notice little buttons throughout the site that let you add or remove trackers when you see lists of bills, rather than having to click through to the individual bills.
• The bill search page now lets you search bills by references (i.e. citations) to the United States Code.
• You can now search GovTrack for historical Members of Congress and can browse Members of Congress by year.
• We’ve improved the way we notice changes to bill status so that the automatic processes that make GovTrack go keep the site better up to made.
• The images that go along with roll call votes have been made to look just a bit nicer.
• The congressional district maps can now be expanded into a full screen mode.
• When you are tracking individual bills, you’ll now get updates when cosponsorship changes.
• Logging into GovTrack was totally broken if you entered your email address with any capital letters. This is fixed now. Oops.

For developers reusing GovTrack data for other projects:

• We’ve now got MODS files for bill text from the GPO, which, among other things, includes the dates bill texts were published (something annoyingly missing up till now).
• I’ve been filling in the “class” field for Senators. This determines which election cycles each senator is in, and when one senator replaces another you should trace it back through the same “class”. I haven’t checked it carefully for accuracy yet. Additionally, we now have two people.xml files, one for current Members of Congress and one for the historical data that has everyone that has ever served in Congress.
• Bill XML files now have some new experimental status codes that more precisely reflect where a bill is in the legislative process.

I mentioned last post that Sunlight Foundation extracted some statistics out of the House’s recently released electronic 3,300-page report on disbursements. Their statistics showed a wide range of salaries for the different types of staff jobs in Congress. I did some further analysis on whether staff salaries are correlated with the congressman’s tenure in office, with some surprising results.

The Sunlight team had to go through a bit of roundabout effort to get these statistics. As I wrote elsewhere, the House did not really do this in a way that supports analysis. Granted, they have a lot of procedures in place and getting out data in a good way isn’t alway trivial. But this is Congress and we hold them to a high standard. That being said, I took Sunlight’s work and massaged the data a bit more to get what I wanted.

The District Director position had a salary that started at $81k for freshman congressmen and went up $580 for each year the congressman was in office. The two other senior positions of Chief of Staff (mean $126k) and Legislative Director (mean $75k) didn’t appear to change with the congressman’s seniority. For the jobs that multiple people could fill, I didn’t divide it by person, so for these we can see the total spend on Legislative Assistants started at $76k for freshman congressmen and went up $880 for each year the congressmen has held office, and for Staff Assistants a total of $48k freshman + $2,500/year. (These all reached high statistical significance.). Like Chief of Staff, Legislative Correspondent (mean $42k) had no variation by time in office.

Also reported is the yearly expense on franked mail. This interestingly decreased by $1,300 per year in office. Similarly, “printing and reproduction” decreased by $2,000 per year in office.

I think it is interesting that the Chief of Staff salary is so stable. It might mean that congressmen make sure they are on an equal footing by all hiring from the same pool of experienced candidates, and also that chiefs of staffs don’t consider it a perk (i.e. willing to take a pay cut) or a detriment (i.e. wanting more pay) to work for new or older congressmen either. Not that we should take the numbers too seriously without more research. Elder congressmen get access to committee staff, for instance. That might change how they make use of their office staff. On the other hand, the data is very messy and there are a lot of outliers that I haven’t cleaned up.

This week the House posted for the first time an electronic version of their master expense report. The report details the pay of everyone employed by Congress, from the Members of Congress to their staff, and other staff in Congress.

The folks over at Sunlight Foundation have extracted some statistics out of the House’s 3,300-page report. We can now see average salaries for different types of staff. Chiefs of staff top off at an average approximate salary of $120,052, with legislative correspondents — the staff members that read constituent mail — coming in near the bottom at $31,951.

The fact that the House has posted this document online at all is a great step forward for transparency, and signals that House leadership (i.e. Speaker Pelosi) understands that a big part of government transparency is putting the raw numbers up online for anyone to read. This is an important example of how to do transparency through technology, though it is not a perfect case. I’ve written an analysis of this case this over on my personal blog.