Also Heard from the NEA Podium

This morning’s Nuclear Energy Assembly session explored the socio-economic trends pointing to a vital role for nuclear power in our nation’s energy mix. Here is a sampling from the wide-ranging roster of speakers:

“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions, satisfying growing energy demand, making energy affordable and enhancing energy security are tasks that are difficult enough individually, but we need to do all of them at the same time. There’s no way around it: this effort requires bold leadership. We need our policymakers to look ahead and understand that we’re living in a new world that requires new approaches.” – Jack Gerard, president and CEO, American Chemistry Council

“Our top priority is the safe operation of the current fleet of U.S. nuclear power plants, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also a global leader in safe regulation. We need to keep our place at the table to ensure a consistent regulatory environment.” – Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

“We have a strategic partnership between the nuclear energy industry and the Building and Construction Trades Department. Ours is an unusual relationship in Washington between organized labor and an industry. We have a common set of interests and mutual respect. We must strengthen our relationship further to enhance our chances of success in the halls of Congress.” – Mark Ayers, president, Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO

“I wish you great good luck on your endeavors for nuclear power. You are at the right moment. Go for it.” – Peggy Noonan, columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author

JoAnn Sperber

Comments

Anonymous said…

“Our top priority is the safe operation of the current fleet of U.S. nuclear power plants, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is also a global leader in safe regulation. We need to keep our place at the table to ensure a consistent regulatory environment.” – Dale Klein, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Sounds like more of the same :-/ Any plans to change fee structure for modularized low power/core approaches?

best regards & thanks for the good work to NEI and others
-t-

May 6, 2008 at 5:53 PM

A Design Team Pictures the Future of Nuclear Energy

For more than 100 years, the shape and location of human settlements has been defined in large part by energy and water. Cities grew up near natural resources like hydropower, and near water for agricultural, industrial and household use.

So what would the world look like with a new generation of small nuclear reactors that could provide abundant, clean energy for electricity, water pumping and desalination and industrial processes?

Hard to say with precision, but Third Way, the non-partisan think tank, asked the design team at the Washington, D.C. office of Gensler & Associates, an architecture and interior design firm that specializes in sustainable projects like a complex that houses the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The talented designers saw a blooming desert and a cozy arctic village, an old urban mill re-purposed as an energy producer, a data center that integrates solar panels on its sprawling flat roofs, a naval base and a humming transit hub.

In the converted mill, high temperat…

Sneak Peek

There's an invisible force powering and propelling our way of life.
It's all around us. You can't feel it. Smell it. Or taste it.
But it's there all the same. And if you look close enough, you can see all the amazing and wondrous things it does.
It not only powers our cities and towns.
And all the high-tech things we love.
It gives us the power to invent.
To explore.
To discover.
To create advanced technologies.
This invisible force creates jobs out of thin air.
It adds billions to our economy.
It's on even when we're not.
And stays on no matter what Mother Nature throws at it.
This invisible force takes us to the outer reaches of outer space.
And to the very depths of our oceans.
It brings us together. And it makes us better.
And most importantly, it has the power to do all this in our lifetime while barely leaving a trace.
Some people might say it's kind of unbelievable.
They wonder, what is this new power that does all these extraordinary things?

Seeing the Light on Nuclear Energy

If you think that there is plenty of electricity, that the air is clean enough and that nuclear power is a just one among many options for meeting human needs, then you are probably over-focused on the United States or Western Europe. Even then, you’d be wrong.

That’s the idea at the heart of a new book, “Seeing the Light: The Case for Nuclear Power in the 21st Century,” by Scott L. Montgomery, a geoscientist and energy expert, and Thomas Graham Jr., a retired ambassador and arms control expert.

Billions of people live in energy poverty, they write, and even those who don’t, those who live in places where there is always an electric outlet or a light switch handy, we need to unmake the last 200 years of energy history, and move to non-carbon sources. Energy is integral to our lives but the authors cite a World Health Organization estimate that more than 6.5 million people die each year from air pollution. In addition, they say, the global climate is heading for ruinous instability. E…

NEI Nuclear Notes

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