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“Our freedoms can
only
be maintained by the advancement of technologies that serve mankind—
not
advancing technology puts Freedom at Risk and
our freedom is
threatened because we
don't take the time to
participate in it” GJD |
U.S. Senator
Lamar Alexander
July
13th, 2009
ALEXANDER UNVEILS BLUEPRINT FOR
100 NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS IN 20 YEARS In Support of GOP “Low-cost Clean
Energy Plan” to Create Jobs, Lower Utility Bills and Reduce Global Warming
U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.),
chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, today unveiled a blueprint for
building 100 new nuclear power plants in 20 years. He said it was his own
blueprint in support of “the four-step” low-cost clean energy plan supported
by the Senate GOP, which also calls for electric vehicles, offshore
exploration for natural gas and oil, and doubling energy research to make
renewable energy cost-competitive.
Alexander said the Republican plan would “create jobs, lower utility bills
and put the United States within the goals of the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming by 2030 without the expensive cap-and-trade and renewable mandates
passed by the House of Representatives two weeks ago.”
In an address at the National Press Club, Alexander described the House plan
as the “high-cost solution to clean energy and climate change. Its economy
wide cap-and-trade and renewable energy mandate is a job-killing,
100-billion-dollar-a-year national energy tax that will add a new utility
bill to every American family budget. The House plan will raise utility
bills and send jobs overseas looking for cheap energy. The Republican Senate
plan will lower utility bills and create jobs.”
In his address, Alexander said that while nuclear power produces only 20
percent of America’s electricity, it produces 70 percent of carbon-free,
pollution-free electricity. He said that one hundred nuclear plants would
double U.S. electricity production from nuclear power in 20 years, making it
about 40 percent of all electricity production. “Add 10 percent for sun and
wind and other renewables, another 10 percent for hydroelectric, maybe 5
percent more for natural gas,” the senator added, “and we begin to have a
cheap as well as clean energy policy.”
Alexander continued, “We should want an America in which we create hundreds
of thousands of ‘green jobs,’ but not at the expense of destroying tens of
millions of red, white and blue jobs. In other words, it doesn’t make any
sense to employ people in the renewable energy sector if we are throwing
them out of work in manufacturing and high tech. That’s what will happen if
these new technologies raise the price of electricity and send manufacturing
and other energy-intensive industries overseas searching for cheap energy.
We want clean, new, energy-efficient cars but we want them built in
Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, not Japan and Mexico.”
He said that the Republican energy plan should not add to the federal budget
since ratepayers will pay for building the plants. Federal loan financing
for the first nuclear plants is designed not to cost taxpayers money;
nuclear plants insure one another. Alexander said that offshore exploration
for oil and gas should produce enough royalty revenues to pay for programs
to encourage electric cars and trucks. He also said that doubling energy
research and development for “mini Manhattan projects” to make renewable
energy cost-competitive would cost about $8 billion more a year, which is
consistent with President Obama’s budget proposals for 2009 and 2010.
For a full copy of the
Senator's blueprint please click
HERE.
Fission, Baby, Fission! - We need a hundred new nuclear plants
Author: Lamar Alexander
Publication: National Review |
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October 16th, 2009
- To cut carbon emissions, the House of Representatives has devised
a cap-and-trade plan that also mandates a switch to renewable
resources -- wind, sunshine, and "biomass" -- for 20 percent of our
energy by 2020. Democrats on the Senate Energy Committee have
proposed a similar mandate. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is
threatening to cut carbon-dioxide emissions by executive order. The
most certain consequence of these proposals is that they will raise
prices and send jobs overseas.
I have a better suggestion. Why don't we build 100 new nuclear
reactors over the next 20 years, as we did between 1970 and 1990? We
would lead the world in fending off global warming, vastly improve
our energy security, create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and
provide ourselves with clean, reliable, low-cost power.
It seems an obvious solution, but it's not happening. There has been
a decade of talk about a "nuclear renaissance," but only in 2007,
after Congress finally overhauled the license-application process,
was a New Jersey company -- NRG Energy Corp. -- able to file the
first license application in 30 years with the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission. If they're lucky and the NRC, which hasn't reviewed an
application in 30 years, is able to meet its goal of getting the
review done in four years, they may get a license by 2011 and a
reactor up and running by 2017. The NRC now has 21 other
applications pending or expected, and the Department of Energy has
awarded four of them federal loan guarantees. The hope is that, once
the first few reactor designs and the applications for specific
construction licenses get through the NRC's review process, reactors
can be built in a reasonable amount of time. It shouldn't be that
hard: The Japanese are completing them in less than four years.
Much of the world is moving ahead. At the U.N. Climate Change Summit
last month, Chinese president Hu Jintao said his country will
"vigorously" expand its nuclear production. China started looking at
reactors only in 2006 but has 132 on the drawing boards already.
Russia has decided to double its nuclear capacity. Japan gets 36
percent of its electricity from nuclear and has two new reactors
under construction. France gets nearly 80 percent of its electricity
from nuclear and has among the cheapest electricity rates in Western
Europe.
The nuclear renaissance is well under way. It just hasn't reached
our shores.
Why is it important that we pursue nuclear, which produces 70
percent of our carbon-free electricity today? Because there simply
won't be any other way to meet the energy demands of the 21st
century unless we go on burning a billion tons of coal each year.
Renewable solar and wind energy, the president's solution, is an
intermittent source of power: It works only about a third of the
time. Until we figure out how to store vast amounts of electricity,
wind and solar can provide only part-time power.
Renewable resources are also afflicted with what the Nature
Conservancy calls "energy sprawl." That is, they take up staggering
amounts of land. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has proposed using
1,000 square miles of western lands to generate 33,000 megawatts of
electricity from new solar installations. You could get the same
from 25 new reactors that would fit comfortably onto existing
nuclear sites. To meet the president's goal of generating 20 percent
of our electricity from wind, we would need to build 186,000 wind
turbines, and they would cover an area the size of West Virginia.
Reactors are the answer. The same people who built them in the past
-- the utility companies -- would build the new ones, with
ratepayers' money. What is needed for this is a limited number of
government loan guarantees, to relieve the uncertainty of whether
the new proposals are ever going to make it through the regulatory
maze. Congress this year appropriated $18.5 billion, and Energy
Secretary Steven Chu has suggested $40 billion, but we probably need
closer to $100 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates
this would cost the government very little money because the energy
companies would pay back the loans.
There are questions concerning safety and nuclear waste. On the
former, according to Energy Secretary Chu -- a Nobel Prize-winning
scientist -- the nuclear-energy industry's record is "really very,
very good." And as far as waste is concerned, Chu says we can safely
store spent fuel in on-site dry casks for the next few decades. In
that time we can commercialize processes currently being researched
at the Department of Energy to recycle the waste without producing
pure, weaponizable plutonium, reduce the waste to only 3 percent of
its original volume, and shorten the time that it is dangerously
radioactive from a million years to only 300, at which time it will
be no more radioactive than the original uranium ore was.
The real problem with nuclear energy is that it is surrounded by
unwarranted fear. With the conspicuous exception of Secretary Chu,
Obama officials are able to wax eloquent only about blanketing the
landscape with 186,000 unreliable, 50-story windmills or thousands
of square miles of solar collectors. When I try to talk to them
about nuclear power, they seem to get a sudden case of indigestion.
Nuclear power has to be a subject we can talk about. And we'd better
do a lot more than talking, soon. Otherwise, we're going to find
ourselves trailing the world in providing low-cost, clean, reliable
energy, and our high-paying jobs will head overseas looking for
cheap, carbon-free, reliable electricity produced by foreign nuclear
plants.
Mr. Alexander is a Republican U.S. senator from Tennessee.
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