February 6th, 2006 - Mr. President, today, President Bush made an announcement of something he calls the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. It is part of the President's 2007 budget for the U.S. Department of Energy. In that budget, at a time when there is not much extra money, there is $250 million to deal with the objectives of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.
Part of the initiative we have heard about before. It calls for advanced technology for nuclear reactors -- reactors from which we can produce clean energy, reactors which are smaller than the reactors that we have today that produce about 20 percent of all the electricity we use in the United States. But I want to call attention to a part of the President's proposal which we have not heard much about before -- at least from him -- that is the part about reprocessing and recycling the fuel that is used in nuclear reactors. That has been something we haven't been doing in the United States for a long time, except in limited cases, and it is something that requires a great deal of attention. My hope is that, while it is a small part of a large budget, the idea of reprocessing and recycling spent fuel from nuclear reactors would have a significant, measured, and careful bipartisan discussion on the floor of the Senate.
Even though it is a small part of the big budget, dealing with the issue of reprocessing spent fuel can make a big difference in the solution to a number of large problems.
For example, whether we are able to deal with global warming within a generation, the only technology we have, of which I am aware, which will produce large amounts of carbon-free energy which would permit the United States and the world to reasonably hope to deal with global warming in this generation is nuclear power.
Even though it is 20 percent of our electricity in the United States today, it produces 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity.
Solving the reprocessing and recycling problem which deals with the issue of energy independence -- and it has been talked a lot about on both sides of the aisle -- if we want to be independent of other countries, we have to have ways to produce large amounts of energy in a clean way. And other than conservation and efficiency, nuclear power, in my judgment, is the only way to do that today.
A third area has to do with clean air. We have other forms of energy production such as coal, a very important form, but coal still produces large amounts of sulfur and nitrogen pollution. It produces mercury. The idea of recapturing the carbon and the integrated gasification process of making that coal-produced electricity clean is something we still have a lot of work to do on.
Dealing with reprocessing will have a lot to do with solving the problems of proliferation concerns that we have about other countries getting hold of spent fuel and turning it into material that can produce nuclear weapons. We read about it every day in terms of Iran and North Korea. It has to do with a balance of payments in the United States.
Some country is going to produce these advanced nuclear technology power plants. Russia, for example, might produce 30 or 40 of these. When it does, it will have the technology available to sell those power plants to India, China, and other parts of the world where they need large amounts of energy which is clean. The United States will be left behind if we are not a part of that process.
I have mentioned all of these issues as if they were American issues -- global warming, energy independence, clean air, proliferation, balance of payments. These are worldwide issues. By one account, 30 percent of pollution in the Los Angeles basin comes from Asia. If India and China aren't able to deal with the global warming issue, with the clean air issues, and with the proliferation issue, every American will be affected.
Today, there are about 430 nuclear reactors in the world being used to produce electricity. About 100 are in the United States. We have a classified number -- maybe it is about the same -- of them which have been used in our nuclear Navy since the 1950s. It is not difficult to imagine a world with 1,000 nuclear reactors. There are 124 nuclear reactors on the drawing board today, or under construction. Until recently, none of those were in the United States. We haven't built one new nuclear power plant from scratch since the 1970s. It is very odd because we have a large demand in this country for large amounts of low-cost, clean energy. We invented the technology. We have used it in our Navy since the 1950s without a single incident.
France is now about 80 percent reliant on electricity from nuclear power. And Japan, which suffered under our use of nuclear weapons, has used nuclear power to produce electricity.
Things though are changing. While nuclear power has some problems, so does every other alternative for producing the large amounts of energy that we and the world needs.
Coal, which I mentioned, produces pollutants, and no one has yet produced a way to deal with all of the carbon that is produced by coal to make it the strategy for future.
Many environmental groups support gasification of coal and capture of the carbon that is emitted -- I am one of those persons who is hopeful about that -- but the idea of recapturing such large amounts of carbon and putting it underground is something we haven't able to do yet.
Drilling for new oil produces lots of arguments in this body and close votes. Importing oil produces many resolutions and arguments in this body as well.
Wind energy is appealing to some, but you would have to cover up the whole State of Massachusetts to produce what one or two nuclear power plants would be able to produce.
Today, solar energy is less than one-tenth of one percent of what we use in America.
So we need nuclear power. In order to have nuclear power, we are going to have to deal with the problem of where we put the spent fuel and what we do about proliferation.
I am glad that the President suggested in his budget today the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. I am glad he put $250 million in it to advance the idea of processing and recycling.
First, we should move ahead with the advanced technology and loan guarantees, the investment tax credits, the risk assurance that was enacted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Second, we should move ahead with research and discussion of reprocessing and recycling so that we can reduce by 90 percent the amount of waste that we would have to store at Yucca Mountain, or similar facilities, and reduce by more than that the heat in that spent fuel.
And finally, we should discuss an international protocol so that while other countries such as the United States, Russia, and others might invent the technology for small, new nuclear power plants, there would be some sort of international protocol that would lease the spent fuel, supervise its processing, and supervise its permanent storage so that we and the world in this generation can deal with global warming, energy independence, clean air, and a variety of other issues that deal with our lives.
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