NEI Nuclear Notes

Sec. John Kerry One of the big ideas pushed by Pandora's Promise concerns the potential of breeder reactors to provide a technological fix to the political question of what to do with used nuclear fuel. A considerable segment of the film tells the story of the Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II) project at Argonne National Laboratory in Idaho and how funding for the project was killed in 1994 at the behest of the Clinton Administration. The film contains a brief clip of U.S. Secretary of State and former U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA) urging his fellow senators to end funding for the EBR-II. But what the film didn't mention is that like the five environmentalists profiled in Pandora's Promise , Secretary Kerry has undergone something of a conversion on the question on nuclear energy himself. Back in 2010, then-Senator Kerry was a co-sponsor of the American Power Act . Though it failed to pass into law, the proposed legislation included a number of key inc...