The Gang of 10 (now Gang of 20) offshore oil drilling bill, as it has been characterized, appears headed for a Senate vote late next week. While the bill apparently isn’t damaging enough to our environment and future for the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd, who are going to try to expand areas allowed for drilling, I won’t go into the oil drilling issues here—they’ve been covered extensively on DK—except perhaps to borrow a phrase about how you can put lipstick on an offshore oil pig and, well, you get the idea....
But what most people—and certainly the mainstream media—haven’t yet realized is that the Gang of 20 bill would do much more than open up some of America’s coastlines to oil drilling. In fact, it is a major energy bill—the draft runs 233 pages—and delves into energy efficiency and conservation, renewables, coal-to-liquid, and so forth. And 18 of these pages would provide the most significant taxpayer-backed boost to nuclear power ever.
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