A good address (once again explaining why, on energy policy, I'd be a Republican, if I was a US citizen - I vote Labour in the UK elections where I am allowed to vote, and Christian Democrat in elections for the national parliament of Germany).
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060218.html
"Good morning. This coming week, I will visit Wisconsin, Michigan, and Colorado, to discuss our strategy to ensure that America has affordable, reliable, and secure sources of energy. The best way to meet our growing energy needs is through advances in technology. So in my State of the Union Address, I announced the Advanced Energy Initiative. We will pursue promising technologies that will transform how we power our vehicles, businesses, and homes -- so we can reduce our Nation's dependence on foreign sources of energy.
This morning, I want to speak to you about one part of this initiative: our plans to expand the use of safe and clean nuclear power. Nuclear power generates large amounts of low-cost electricity without emitting air pollution or greenhouse gases. Yet nuclear power now produces only about 20 percent of America's electricity. It has the potential to play an even greater role. For example, over the past three decades, France has built 58 nuclear power plants and now gets more than 78 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. Yet here in America, we have not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s. So last summer I signed energy legislation that offered incentives to encourage the building of new nuclear plants in America. Our goal is to start the construction of new nuclear power plants by the end of this decade.
As America and other nations build more nuclear power plants, we must work together to address two challenges: We must dispose of nuclear waste safely, and we must keep nuclear technology and material out of the hands of terrorist networks and terrorist states.
To meet these challenges, my Administration has announced a bold new proposal called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. Under this partnership, America will work with nations that have advanced civilian nuclear energy programs, such as France, Japan, and Russia. Together, we will develop and deploy innovative, advanced reactors and new methods to recycle spent nuclear fuel. This will allow us to produce more energy, while dramatically reducing the amount of nuclear waste and eliminating the nuclear byproducts that unstable regimes or terrorists could use to make weapons.
As these technologies are developed, we will work with our partners to help developing countries meet their growing energy needs by providing them with small-scale reactors that will be secure and cost-effective. We will also ensure that these developing nations have a reliable nuclear fuel supply. In exchange, these countries would agree to use nuclear power only for civilian purposes and forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons. My new budget includes $250 million to launch this initiative. By working with other nations under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, we can provide the cheap, safe, and clean energy that growing economies need, while reducing the risk of nuclear proliferation.
As we expand our use of nuclear power, we're also pursuing a broader strategy to meet our energy needs. We're investing in technologies like solar and wind power and clean coal to power our homes and businesses. We're also investing in new car technologies like plug-in hybrid cars and in alternative fuels for automobiles like ethanol and biodiesel.
Transforming our energy supply will demand creativity and determination, and America has these qualities in abundance. Our Nation will continue to lead the world in innovation and technology. And by building a global partnership to spread the benefits of nuclear power, we'll create a safer, cleaner, and more prosperous world for future generations.
Thank you for listening."
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2 comments:
My analysis of Bush's Advanced Energy Initiative and State of the Union address goes over similar issues. I'd be curious to hear your comments.
And I'm still waiting for someone to succesfully make the case that Nuclear is better than Coal Gasification Combined Cycle (with or w/out CO2 sequestration) for future baseload capacity in the U.S. Noone has given me an answer on what we do with the waste, exactly how much there is, how long it lasts, how much plutonium we would have to secure and how we would do so, etc.
There's always just these vague statements like we'll 'recycle' it, or it's 'safe and clean', etc.
I buy that new nuclear plants are probably safe enough to not worry about disasters during normal operating malfunctions, although I'm still not convinced that they wouldn't make excellent targets for terrosists to sabotage. How will we secure hundreds of new nuclear plants from attack? Why build that many new targets (a wind farm and even a coal gasification plant for that matter doesn't blow and spew radioactive waste for miles around when it's sabotaged)?
Anyway, there's still plenty of unaswered questions about nuclear power. Not that some or all of them can't be satisfactorily answered - I've got an open mind about this - it's just that noone has done so, at least not that I have read yet. So until they do, I'll remain skeptical...
Thanks for your comment.
I think that nuclear will be significantly cheaper than emissions free coal fired plants, I also think it'll be less resource constrained.
The waste could just be dumped, finely distributed, in the sea, the resulting change in background radiation would be negligible and it would represent zero proliferation risk.
It could also be stored awaiting recycling of the plutoniom. With the Pu recycled the rest of the waste will be about as radioactive as the original uranium within a few hundred years, and within a few decades I wouldn't consider the radioactivity a major issue anymore.
The proliferation risk from the Pu isn't all that serious anyway, because the Pu from conventional reactors makes bombs fizzle. To avoid this, reactors have to have a special design (eg Chernobyl) to allow quick removal of fuel rods and contamination with undesirable (from a bomb making view) isotopes.
Pu for weapons has always been obtained from specially designed reactors, not spent fuel rods from conventional Western style nuclear power plants (as hinted above Chernobyl was designed with bomb making in mind).
Short of using nuclear weapons, it's quite hard to crack today's nuclear reactors. And if releases do happen, one's got to be aware of how serious a risk radiation really presents. The popular image of this (not least due to misrepresentations in the media) is grossly wrong. Radiation is ubiquitous. It would be immensely hard to cause many deaths through radiation sickness from any kind of nuclear power plant accident (or terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant). The vast majority of deaths would come over decades from an imperceptible rise in the death rate from cancer in a very large population.
So, I see both the likelihood of a truely serious release (of the Chernobyl magnitude) as low, and I don't see the consequences in the same light as the popular image of Chernobyl.
You talk about vague statements in defense of nuclear power, but aren't the accusations pretty vague, as well (largely invocations of how dangerous radiation is, how any dose can kill ...)?
I see nuclear power as on a similar level environment and safety wise as emissions free coal, solar and wind.
Safety wise, some large dams are probably the worst there is in terms of single sources of risk (depending on the dam, a break could kill millions, mostly within a a few hours). Otherwise, the worst power plant, accident risk wise, I think is the car. There are a million fatalities every year just from road traffic accidents.
Traditional biomass is even worse, though the deaths are from normal operation. Smoke from dung and firewood in developing countries is among the top ten causes of death and disease, and is particularly bad for children under five who are already suffering from poor nutrition and infectious diseases.
As I've said elsewhere, I don't think not using nuclear power is going to turn US citizens into paupers, there are other options, and the US is rich and can afford to make do without extra nuclear power, and the effect of this will just be slightly slower economic growth. But I don't buy the anti-nuclear arguments about waste and safety, and therefore prefer nuclear to the other available options on economic grounds.
Also, if we always made decisions based on groundless fears, even if in each single case the effect is small, cumulatively these poor decisions would start to have a big effect.
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