department of energy

April 8, 2016 - The U.S. announced a deal last week to move weapons-grade plutonium from Japan and ship it to the Savannah River Site on the South Carolina-Georgia border, where there are longstanding concerns about the environmental health risks that low-income and African-American communities disproportionately bear.

August 4, 2014 - Should companies that reincorporate abroad to avoid federal taxes be able to win federal contracts? A group of Democratic members of Congress has drafted legislation to halt the practice.

April 24, 2014 - The U.S. Department of Energy has been less than forthcoming with details about a loan guarantee to help Georgia Power and its partners build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia. As it turns out, the company is getting quite a deal: absolutely free credit. Will taxpayers get burned again?

March 26, 2014 - Watchdog groups are raising concerns about calls to move coal ash from wet impoundments into dry landfills, warning of inevitable leakage from landfills that are typically located in low-income and minority communities. Instead, they propose storing the waste above ground in concrete vaults on power plant property.

March 25, 2013 - MIT physicist Ernest Moniz is an academic who has also served on boards or advisory councils of large energy companies, including BP.

March 20, 2013 - A watchdog group with a track record of uncovering conflicts of interest in fracking research has discovered that the president's energy nominee failed to disclose he was a director of a firm that profits from the shale gas industry at the time he released an influential study concluding the environmental impacts of the controversial gas drilling practice were "manageable."

February 28, 2013 - Taxpayers for Common Sense has given a tongue-in-cheek "Golden Fleece Award" to the U.S. Department of Energy for speculatively spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars on small modular reactors being sought by the Tennessee Valley Authority and Savannah River Site.

January 31, 2013 - The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy fought the Obama administration in court to get it to disclose details about the $8.3 billion in loan guarantees it offered private companies to build two nuclear reactors at Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle. Though heavily redacted, the documents they got suggest there may be trouble for taxpayers if the deal is finalized as now structured.

December 14, 2012 - This week the federal government took big steps toward building a commercial offshore wind industry in the Southeast -- but its future could be threatened by the expiration of a key tax credit.

September 24, 2012 - As the boom in oil and gas drilling sends a surge of waste into underground injection wells, safeguards for disposing of these materials are sometimes being ignored or circumvented.