While President Obama pulled duty in New Orleans the other day, as we reported in the post below, Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu is in Paris speaking to a meeting of the International Energy Agency. You can decide who pulled the better duty.
Chu and the energy ministers are all jockeying for position during the run up to Copenhagen. But this Bloomberg article shows him pushing nuclear energy in a notably “aggressive” way.
The U.S. government will announce loan guarantees for nuclear plants “very soon,” Chu said. “Nuclear power is an important part of what the U.S. has to do to reduce emissions.”
The U.S. is “working aggressively to restart the nuclear industry,” he said. “I believe the nuclear waste problem is solvable on a scientific level and a political level.”
We’ll be waiting for those announcements – we do think more loan guarantees will get that aggressive work going even more aggressively, but that may wait to be done in the Senate climate change bill.
Good words, as always, from Chu, though. With loan guarantees and the long-awaited Blue Ribbon commission on used nuclear fuel coming, 2010 looks to be an interest year for our friend the atom.
Comments
This blue ribbon panel is absurd, Yucca is dead and reprocessing review was canceled by the Obama administration. What conclusion is this panel going to reach - launch it into the sun?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7252/full/460152b.html
You need to understand the history of who we are dealing with here. This is just Obama's way of voting "present" on the nuclear waste issue. It's cowardice, not leadership.
Not the kind of leadership you people wanted, of course. But yeah, the blue ribbon commission not going to change anything about his stance, it's just designed to get intermittent support from people like you.
- loan modification tips should do nively