Senators pull offshore drilling bill with big nuclear giveaways

Nuclear power foes are celebrating a small victory this week: In the wake of last Wednesday's national call-in day against unlimited taxpayer loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors, the so-called "Gang of 20" senators who were pushing a bipartisan compromise energy bill containing those giveaways have announced that they will not introduce the measure before Congress adjourns for elections.

Besides boosting the nuclear industry, the measure also would have transitioned most of the country's automobiles to non-petroleum fuels within 20 years, repealed billions in tax breaks for oil companies, and allowed Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia to decide whether to allowing drilling off their coasts.

Michael Mariotte, the executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, reports that several Senate offices reported "very large volumes" of calls on the bill. NIRS opposed the bill because of the nuclear giveaways and was one of the organizers of the call-in day.

Other likely factors behind the measure's demise include the federal government's recent commitment to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out companies impacted by the housing market crisis, Mariotte notes. In addition, Constellation Energy -- the parent of UniStar, the first company to apply for a nuclear loan guarantee -- collapsed last week and was bought by billionaire Warren Buffett's MidAmerican Energy for less than a quarter of what it was worth at the beginning of this year.

But not all cleaner-energy advocates are celebrating the bill's demise. Writing at the Huffington Post, Dr. Joseph Romm -- a former Department of Energy official in the Clinton administration who's now with the Center for American Progress -- calls the bill's failure a "huge triumph for McCain and major political blunder by Congressional Democrats." Noting that the existing moratorium on expanded offshore drilling is set to expire at the end of this month if no action is taken, Romm accuses the environmentalists who opposed the compromise bill of allowing the allies of Republican presidential candidate John McCain to kill the measure "without leaving obvious fingerprints."

TheHill.com reports that the so-called Gang of 20 will instead offer a statement of principles outlining their agreement on divisive energy issues, including expanded offshore drilling:

They plan to offer legislation once the political season has ended, according to an aide to a Democrat involved in the discussions. The aide said that the election-year environment has poisoned the atmosphere and hampered the chances of passing a bill on such a controversial campaign topic.