Bacon's Rebellion

  • What’s in a Name?

    Posted on

    by

    Robin Beres

    by Joe Fitzgerald

    I have previously written much about the Bluestone Town Center from a logistical and political standpoint, much of which can be summed up by saying the people planning and approving the project do not understand logistics or politics. The planners and approvers show an understanding of and ability to manipulate governmental processes, which is a skill on the level of getting a stubborn toddler to give up a favorite toy if you could pick and choose your toddlers through low-turnout elections and rampant cronyism.

    Today, however, I am writing about design, marketing, and labeling. First, some background.

    The Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority (HRHA), has formed a partnership with EquityPlus (EP) to build Bluestone Town Center. That partnership is an LLC, a limited liability corporation, a legal entity designed to protect the owners of a project from responsibility. The entity is owned 51 percent by HRHA and 49 percent by EP. A wild guess about the split is that having a government entity as the (barely) majority owner adds the shield of sovereign immunity as well as the exemptions to government rules that government entities give to themselves.
    (more…)

  • Putting Off Paying Your Debt is Not “Bill Relief”

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    In this case, for us along with Popeye’s friend, “Tuesday” translates into “after the next election.”

    by Steve Haner

    Whether customers pay a lot more for one year starting this July, or just a little bit more for ten years starting next winter, Dominion Energy Virginia’s entire backlog of accumulated fuel costs from prior years will be paid in full.   Every dollar will come from customers, with annual interest tacked on in the case of the long-term approach.

    The second approach, the “put it on the credit card and pay the minimum” approach, is not bill relief.  Paying less now in order to pay more for ten years is not bill relief.  It is bad enough that a major newspaper is helping to sell the con.  The story was then shared on Twitter as an example of “Republican-led utility reform,” and Democrats are likely to seek to claim credit, as well. (more…)

  • Political Embellishment and Poor Journalism

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Some Virginians, along with citizens in the rest of the country, will be able to receive refunds from the company Intuit, the developers of the TurboTax automated tax return preparation program. According to a report in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, approximately $3.5 million will be available for distribution to Virginians.

    “TurboTax misled Virginians, and now they are officially paying the price,” Attorney General Miyares said in a statement. “I’m proud that my office was able to put that money back into the affected consumers’ pockets, where it belonged all along.”

    There are a couple of things wrong with this statement. First of all, his office had virtually nothing to do with the settlement. Second, the announcement is late; the settlement was reached a year ago. (more…)

  • Good Questions About Nuclear Power Answered

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Surrey Power Station Unit 1. Courtesy Dominion Energy

    A reader asked two excellent questions:

    The issues with nuclear power have been:

    1. The waste generated remains radioactive and dangerous for a very long time.
    2. In the case of failure, a huge risk is exposed as was the case in Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima.

    Do these new, small reactors bypass either of those risks?

    The short answers are:

    • The new large reactors for sale now are safer than those in the field.
    • New small reactors offer to greatly improve both the safety and efficiency of even the latest versions of the large reactors with a vastly smaller footprint. That includes Westinghouse’s new small reactor announced today that uses technology already approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It expects deployment in 2027.
    • The designs of the small modular reactors (SMRs) in development under dual Department of Energy (DOE) and corporate sponsorship incorporate more revolutionary safety design features than any the designs already approved by the NRC for operational use. You will read below that the DOE has identified three revolutionary commercial vendor-backed SMR designs that it expects to be ready for NRC operating approval by 2030.
    • Some of the new SMRs actually consume nuclear waste from other sources.

    Now for the longer version. (more…)

  • UVa’s 20-Year Expenditure Explosion

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon


    by James A. Bacon

    Tis the season for Virginia’s universities to announce how much they are raising tuition & fees for the upcoming academic year. Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors has jacked up tuition by 4.9% and the College of William & Mary by 4.5%. Virginia Commonwealth University is considering an increase of 4% to 5%, George Mason University 3%. After a bout of inflation that peaked around 9% and is still running about 6%, putting both university and family budgets under stress, the pressure on governing boards is intense.

    At the University of Virginia a tuition increase has been baked into the cake since November 2021 when the Board of Visitors approved a two-year increase of 4.7% in 2022-23 and 3.7% in 2023-24. Under pressure from Governor Glenn Youngkin to hold down charges, UVa issued a rebate to in-state undergraduate students to offset last year’s increase. But there has been no indication that the Board will reconsider a refund in 2023-24. In-state undergrads could well find themselves paying 8.4% more next year.

    UVa officials, like their peers at the state’s other public universities, blame the failure of state support for higher education to keep pace with growing enrollment and the escalating Consumer Price Index. In the past, UVa’s board has rarely questioned that claim. But now some board members want to dig deeper into the numbers. (more…)

  • Europe’s Complex Rebuttal to American Wokesters

    Posted on

    by

    Bob Rayner

    by Donald Smith

    On the periphery of Rome, not far from the Vatican, stands a towering obelisk named for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator and ally of Adolf Hitler. On a recent visit to the city, my taxi driver knew exactly where it was and found nothing remarkable about a request to go there.

    The Mussolini Obelisk, standing watch over the Foro Italico sports complex, served as the starting point for my atypical tour of the Eternal City’s ‘fascist architecture.’ At the very outset, our tour group asked our guide: Why has the Mussolini Obelisk not been removed from what appears to be a place of honor?

    For an American visitor, it was the obvious question. We have become accustomed to the removal of the likenesses of Confederate generals and even Christopher Columbus from public places. But it was not a difficult question for our guide to answer: ‘In Italy, we view it as history.’ Efforts to remove it had fizzled.

    The loss that comes from laundering the past was made clear to us in the historical lesson our tour group received that day — a lesson that would have been impossible if cancel culture, American-style, had prevailed.

    This is the beginning of “Italy’s Non-Cancel Culture,” an article by Howard Husock, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.  Husock’s article appeared in early April.  In late April, Elon Musk went on Real Time With Bill Maher and discussed the “woke mind virus” that’s infecting nearly everything nowadays.  Musk talked about his own experience with “cancel-culture, American style.”   (more…)

  • Bible Quotes Verboten in Loudoun Teacher’s Work Email

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    A Loudoun County school teacher has been told to remove a Bible verse from the signature block of her work email. She contends her constitutional rights are being violated, according to the UPI news service.

    Loudoun County Public Schools maintains that the quote — “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16” — runs afoul of the Establishment Clause, which prohibits governmental establishment of religion.

    If anyone runs afoul of the Constitution, it’s the Loudoun school system for using its power to expunge a personal expression of religious belief. An individual school teacher acting in her private capacity is not the government. Expressing her faith in an email signature block is not establishing a religion.

    I’m an atheist and have been most of my life. But when I encounter idiocy like Loudoun’s ban, I’m tempted to start attending church as a form of cultural and political resistance. I don’t put any stock in Christian theology, but I have a deep appreciation for the moral system that the Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed our society. And I don’t want to see militant secularism enthroned as the new government-sanctioned worldview. (more…)

  • Westinghouse Joins the Small Nuclear Reactor Market

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Westinghouse, whose flagship AP1000 nuclear reactor is the American entry into the international market for large nuclear power plants, today announced a new reactor, called the AP300, which it claims will be available in 2027.

    It will generate about a third of the power of the AP1000 reactor.

    It is targeted at about $1 billion per delivered plant, well below the $6 billion plus for an AP1000 plant.

    All of the technologies are already licensed by the NRC.

  • Clean Virginia’s Views on Small Modular (Nuclear) Reactors

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    By James C. Sherlock

    VOYGR™ SMR plants powered by NuScale Power Module™, the first and only small modular reactor (SMR) to receive design approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).

    I wrote in an earlier article that I had reached out to Clean Virginia on its policy on Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and had not received a response.

    Laura Gonzalez Guerrero, Clean Virginia’s energy policy lead, has been kind enough to contact me with that answer.  She was out of the office on April 25th when I inquired.

    Ms. Guerrero’s response today:

    “Clean Virginia recognizes SMRs as a nascent technology that has neither been fully tested nor proven to be cost-competitive.

    Thus, it is our view that this technology warrants further study by the state.

    Specifically, we hope state agencies lead a process with stakeholder input to understand and research SMRs and other technologies like hydrogen to determine their viability and the pathways to deploy these technologies in the safest and most cost-effective way possible.”

    I fully expect that Clean Virginia, understanding that the Commonwealth has no equivalent state government expertise in next generation nuclear power, will also consider the decisions of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

    I sincerely thank Ms. Guerrero for her response.

  • The VMI Alumni Association’s Competitive Authoritarianism Regime Subjugates its Members

    Posted on

    by

    Robin Beres

    by Bob Morris, Gene Rice, and Mike Staso

    On April 25, 2023, a group of Virginia Military Institute (VMI) alumni filed suit against the VMI Alumni Association, Inc. The complaint alleges that the Association refused members’ requests for records that will permit them to communicate with 20,000+ fellow members by email — the same vehicle the Association uses, and permits others to use.

    The right of Alumni Association Members to obtain such a list, and other corporate records, is guaranteed to all members of Virginia non-stock corporations under state law. Virginia Code §§933 and 845 requires any non-stock corporation to produce such records when requested by members if they have a proper purpose.

    The Association’s response was swift and accusatory. It stated that the members list is denied to protect the privacy of its members, and implies the lawsuit is an attempt by out-of-control alumni to usurp the protected means of communications between the Association and alumni.
    (more…)

  • Generation IV and V Technology Offer to Make Opposition to Nuclear Power a Historical Artifact

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    Courtesy Terrestrial Energy Inc.

    by James C. Sherlock

    We write here often about electric power in Virginia, but usually related to public utilities. We focus on Dominion and Appalachian Power.

    There is another big market: industrial power plants independent of utilities and the grid (and thus not requiring State Corporation Commission approval).

    Those are not reflected in the plans of the utilities except inasmuch as they lower demand.

    Users include the steel and cement industries, oil and gas, pulp and paper, mining, and chemical industries. And military bases.

    The United States Navy is the world’s most advanced operational user of nuclear power and thus has both a culture and a corporate structure to support nuclear energy.

    Each of the military services needs to maintain the independence of its major bases from utilities to control costs, to ensure reliability by independence from the grid and thus to support uninterrupted operations.

    But even the Navy does not currently use nuclear power to provide co-generation of the steam and electricity needs of its shore infrastructure.

    Among the technical reasons industrial power plants are conventionally powered:

    1. low-heat commercial nuclear reactors are not capable of efficient co-generation; and
    2. high-heat newer technology reactors shorten the life span of the graphite in the cores.

    Molten Salt Reactors (MSR), a Generation IV nuclear technology system, were pioneered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory starting in 1968.

    An advanced co-generation MSR targeted for commercial deployment in 2030 just achieved a major milestone in Canada.

    It offers clean co-generation. (more…)

  • Enjoy the Blackouts — They’re Coming!

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    The graph above shows the key trend driving the major revisions in Dominion’s 2023 Integrated Resource Plan, which Steve Haner describes in the previous post. The projections of peak summer electricity demand, based on PJM Interconnection forecasts, has been consistently revised upward, taking a dramatic jump higher in the 2023 iteration. The massive shift largely reflects changes in methodology but it also incorporates data showing that demand is increasing more rapidly than previously projected.

    The demand projections underpinning the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which showed electricity demand decreasing somewhat, are a fantasy. It is impossible to reach zero net-carbon in the Dominion service territory by 2045 without putting Virginia’s electric grid at risk of catastrophic failure. (more…)

  • Dominion’s New Plan Abandons Carbon Free Goal

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    Rendering of a GE combined-cycle natural gas-burning plant.  Despite demands from some for carbon free electricity, Dominion wants to add more gas generation in Virginia.

    by Steve Haner

    Dominion Energy Virginia has long been warning, albeit somewhat quietly, that the dream of running Virginia’s economy on nothing but solar, wind and battery power was not based on reality.  With the filing of its most recent integrated resource plan (IRP) on May 1, proposing how to meet customer needs out 25 years, it has made those warnings concrete.

    The alternative plan that the company points to as preferred includes adding natural gas generation as early as 2028, an idea not even hinted at in the previous plan just a year ago. It wants to add 2,900 megawatts of new gas plants in all.  That proposal will prove anathema to the climate alarmism movement that imposed the Virginia Clean Economy Act just three years ago, demanding carbon-emissions-free electricity by 2045. (more…)

  • More Nuclear Power in Virginia?

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    VOYGR™ SMR plants powered by NuScale Power Module™, the only small modular reactor (SMR) to receive design approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).  Courtesy NuScale.

    by James C. Sherlock

    Where is Virginia going with nuclear power, the non-carbon energy source that works 24/7/365 to maintain grid stability for all those sources that do not?

    Where we are. Virginia has four nuclear reactors producing electric power — two at Surry station in Surrey County (produces 14% of Virginia’s electricity) and two at North Anna in Louisa County (17% of Virginia’s electricity).

    Surry has two Westinghouse pressurized water reactors that went on-line in 1972 and 1973 respectively. Surry’s licenses from the NRC have been renewed to 2052 and 2053 respectively. North Anna has two similar Westinghouse reactors which went on-line in 1978 and 1980, respectively. Dominion expects those licenses to be extended until 2058 and 2060.

    In 2017, Dominion was issued a permit by the NRC to build a third, much more powerful and newer technology reactor at North Anna. The permit is good until 2037. It is not in Dominion’s current plans.

    Under the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), Virginia is legally required to retire all baseload generation, except for incumbent nuclear power plants, in favor of renewable generation by 2050.

    In 2022, Governor Youngkin released an all-of-the-above energy plan which announced that Virginia would build a Small Modular Reactor (SMR) in southwest Virginia.

    The goal is to have the SMR in operation by 2032.

    For an explanation of SMR, see Dominion’s short essay starting on page 9 of its Integrated Resource Plan. Dominion has included SMRs as an available resource in all of its plan options beginning in 2032.

    That initiative is welcome, but is fuzzy with regard to actual deployment plans, which are not yet formulated.

    And fuzzy with regards to compliance with the VCEA, at least to me. If they are not compliant, then the law should be changed to accommodate them. (more…)

  • Tornado

    Posted on

    by

    Robin Beres

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Virginia Beach isn’t tornado country. We know the drill with hurricanes. We had a rash of those in the ‘80s and ‘90s. From August to November most of us keep well-stocked hurricane boxes handy. And we have days — sometimes more than a week — to prepare or evacuate when a storm is heading our way.

    But when an ear-piercing tornado siren shrieked from our cellphones early Sunday evening — giving us what turned out to be a one-minute warning before the twister touched down in Great Neck — it required split-second action.

    This arrived on my phone at 5:47 p.m.


    (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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