Feeling Noncommittal

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is "wondering just what the nation's nuclear power companies are up to these days." While "taking steps toward building new reactors," the companies are "each emphasizing they have 'made no commitment' at all to actually building new nuclear plants." According to the paper, "The industrywide use of the 'no commitment' mantra is no accident. It's included in nuclear-energy talking points that showed up last year on the Web site for the industry's federal lobbying organization, the Nuclear Energy Institute." An NEI spokesperson said "the noncommitment mantra is a kind of 'hedging' - not unusual ... for publicly traded companies beginning to talk about potentially huge future capital investments."