Skip to main content

Clay Sell on the Bush Nuclear Energy Policy

By Eric McErlain
We just got hold of the remarks made by Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell at yesterday's NuStart press conference. No link was available, so we've reproduced the text here in full:
It is an honor to be here today on behalf of President Bush and Secretary Bodman… to take part in an event that could lead to a more secure energy future for our nation.

The companies that make up the Nustart Consortium are among the world’s top operators of nuclear facilities, and are well-positioned to build the first new nuclear power plants in the United States in nearly three decades.

There is no better time for a renaissance of nuclear power in this country. Our growing dependence on foreign energy… and increasing concerns about air emissions… make nuclear power’s advantages over other methods of electricity production more pronounced than ever.

Nuclear power is the only technology we currently have that can reliably produce base-load electricity without any pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. The 103 nuclear plants operating in our country today provide electricity for one in every five American homes and businesses.

But during their development and construction, the builders of many of these plants – which include some of the companies here today – endured major financial and regulatory problems. Many plants cost billions more than originally projected… and took years longer to complete than anticipated. As a result, nuclear power projects became too risky to finance… and nuclear construction in the United States ground to a halt.

But many things have changed since then. Advances in technology and management improvements have made U.S. nuclear power plants some of the safest and most cost-effective industrial facilities we have. And new reactor designs will make the next generation of plants even safer and more efficient than the current fleet. As President Bush said in a recent speech, “It’s time to start building again.”

Unfortunately, the high development costs, regulatory uncertainties, and licensing concerns of the past remain in place… making it difficult for companies to commit to new nuclear construction. But if no new plants are built... nuclear power’s current 20 percent of U.S. electricity production will drop to 14 percent by 2025… and then toward zero as the current plants are retired. Secretary Bodman recently said that allowing nuclear power to undergo such a decline in the United States would be economically and environmentally irresponsible.

Making sure that nuclear power is a viable part of our future energy mix is the goal of the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Power 2010 Program. The NuStart Consortium is a direct outgrowth of this program… which is designed to work with industry in a 50/50 cost-shared arrangement to demonstrate the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s new “one-step” licensing process, identify suitable sites for new plants, and certify new state-of-the-art designs. This would help pave the way for an industry decision to build new advanced light-water reactors in the United States in the next few years.

In addition to this program, the President has proposed further regulatory reforms, along with risk insurance for the first new plants that come on-line. Beyond these efforts, we also need to address the issues of spent nuclear fuel and continued political opposition to nuclear power.

On the subject of spent fuel, I want to emphasize that the President and his Administration are committed to completing the Yucca Mountain project… which will remove another major impediment to a revival of nuclear construction in this country – a revival that has taken a giant step forward with the NuStart Consortium’s selection of finalist sites for the first new plants.

Thank you again for inviting me today… and congratulations on achieving such a significant milestone in this important effort.
For more on the Nuclear Power 2010 program, drop by Searching for the Truth.

Technorati tags: , , , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
How much of the increase in costs of the 1970's nuclear plants was due to frivolous lawsuits by the self-styled guardians of the environment, led by the likes of one Ms. J__e F___a, who learnt their physics from "The China Syndrome"? It is my view that if these activists had been required to pay the costs of their unsuccessful litigation, the costs of construction would not have blown out by billions. Nuclear power is safe, and in the West always was. TMI proved that containment works and is a prudent safety measure. If all the plants ordered in the 1970's had been built, the USA would not be diffident about acceding to Kyoto, we would already be producing less green house gases than in 1970 .
May 27, 2005 at 8:59 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

By
Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...
23 comments
Read more

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

By
Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...
7 comments
Read more

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

By
You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...
6 comments
Read more