Editor's Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. Subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of "The Late Great USA," a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation's sovereignty.

The Department of Energy is preparing to award $18.5 billion in guarantees for federal loans to build nuclear power plants in the United States, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.

At the same time, the excitement for ethanol as a renewable fuel of the future continues to fade, Corsi wrote.

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Fuel Ethanol Workshop held in Denver last week was sparsely attended, compared with the standing-room only audience who attended last year's workshop in St. Louis, according to a Denver area television station news report.

"The question is still: is ethanol the fuel of the future, or a passing fad?" Channel 7 News in Denver reported. "The industry with so much promise is struggling as several companies, including one of the largest, are bankrupt."

Red Alert has previously reported that bankruptcies continue to plague the ethanol industry, despite a 45 cent per gallon federal subsidy and a federal mandate that requires U.S. gasoline producers to use 12 billion gallons of ethanol this year, with the requirement increasing to 15 billion gallons by 2015.

Red Alert has also discussed a Congressional Budget Office report issued in May, entitled, "The Impact of Ethanol Use on Food Prices and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions," that concluded the "break-even ratio" of the price per gallon of retail gasoline to the price per bushel of corn is currently about 0.9.

In other words, the CBO concluded, "when the price of gasoline is more than 90 percent of the price of a bushel of corn, it is profitable to produce ethanol."

With corn currently trading at about $4.19 a bushel, gasoline would have to cost about $3.77 a gallon for the production of ethanol to be profitable, even with generous government subsidies and rigorous government mandates for increasing the percentage of ethanol that needs to be blended into gasoline.

With oil trading above $72 a barrel and regular gasoline averaging $2.97 a gallon nationwide, the production of ethanol is not likely to be profitable, according to the CBO's calculations.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the first round of building envisioned by the Department of Energy would add seven nuclear reactors to the U.S. existing fleet of 104 nuclear power plants at a likely cost of more than $40 billion.

The $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees would permit the selected companies to start building the new nuclear reactors as early as 2011, with the plants likely to come online by 2015 or 2016.

Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee supported an endorsement to the Energy Policy Act of 2005 endorsing nuclear energy as clean and secure, according to the International Business Times.

The Wall Street Journal reported that nuclear power was gaining favor in the Obama administration, largely because Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has come to see the lower carbon dioxide output of nuclear power plants as a major advantage over conventionally fueled power plants.

The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch also noted another factor in the administration's decision making was the increasing evidence from France and Japan that new generations of nuclear power plants are safe and can avoid the type of potential disasters seen in the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979.

France generates approximately 80 percent of its electricity from a fleet of 60 nuclear power plants that emit very little carbon dioxide, according to the New York Times.

The Department of Energy intends the federal loan guarantees to be a major factor assisting the selected power companies to access the institutional and private capital needed to complete the proposed nuclear power plant facilities, Corsi wrote.

Red Alert's author, whose books "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command" have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the U.S. and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.

In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.

For financial guidance during difficult times, read Jerome Corsi's Red Alert, the premium, online intelligence news source by  the WND staff writer, columnist and author of the New York Times No. 1 best-seller, "The Obama Nation."

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