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President Bush Addresses Nuclear Energy at Press Conference

By Eric McErlain
President Bush had a lot of positive things to say about nuclear energy in his prime time press conference last night:
Over the past decade, America's energy consumption has been growing about 40 times faster than our energy production. That means we're relying more on energy produced abroad. To reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, we must take four key steps. First, we must better use technology to become better conservers of energy. Secondly, we must find innovative and environmentally sensitive ways to make the most of our existing energy resources, including oil, natural gas, coal and safe, clean nuclear power.

And . . .
We should have a active energy -- nuclear energy policy in America. We've got abundant resources of coal, and we're spending money for clean-coal technology. So these are longer term projects all aimed at making us become less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

This exchange with Terry Moran of ABC News caught my eye:
Q So am I reading correctly that the energy bill would not have had an effect on today's high gasoline --

THE PRESIDENT: Well, it would have 10 years ago. That's exactly what I've been saying to the American people -- 10 years ago if we'd had an energy strategy, we would be able to diversify away from foreign dependence. And -- but we haven't done that. And now we find ourselves in the fix we're in. It's taken us a while to get there, and it's going to take us a while to get out.

What's the price tag for dawdling? According to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers study published recently, it's going to take $12.7 trillion through 2030 to upgrade the world's electrical grid -- that's power plants and transmission capacity.

Looks like we have a lot of work to do.

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