[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 87 (Thursday, June 11, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6531-S6533]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         SMALL NUCLEAR REACTORS

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I would like to report a tremendous 
historic development in the ability of our country to have clean air, 
an effective way to deal with climate change, and enough low-cost, 
reliable electricity to help keep jobs in this country. Yesterday I 
attended a press conference from a company, Babcock & Wilcox. Also 
included was the Tennessee Valley Authority. The company and TVA 
announced that Babcock & Wilcox will soon make an application to the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to start building and 
selling a small nuclear reactor that can be built in a factory, shipped 
by railway to a site, and put together like Lego blocks at the site. 
The nuclear reactor is a 125-megawatt reactor. That compares with the 
large nuclear plants, of which we have 104 today in the United States. 
Those plants produce, on average, 1,000 megawatts of electricity. This 
would be 125. So the real prospect exists that we will be able to have, 
in this country, nuclear reactors for electricity that might cost as 
little as one-tenth as much to build, can be built in 3 years instead 
of 6, and will produce, as I said, 125 megawatts instead of 1,000--
making it easier to integrate them into our electric grid--and can be 
built in a factory and shipped to a customer.

[[Page S6532]]

  The reason I am excited about this prospect is it has a real chance 
of happening. No one has built more small reactors in the world than 
Babcock & Wilcox, and the Tennessee Valley Authority is the largest 
public utility in the United States and the only utility in the United 
States that is currently building a nuclear powerplant.
  Republicans and, I am sure, many Democrats, but certainly Republicans 
in the Senate and the House, unanimously believe our goal as a country 
ought to be to build 100 new large nuclear powerplants over the next 20 
years, while we figure out renewable electricity. The reason we want to 
do that is we want to deal with climate change. We want clean air, but 
we want to be able to keep jobs here at the same time. If climate 
change is the inconvenient problem, nuclear power is the inconvenient 
solution.
  Why is that? Climate change is caused by carbon that comes from coal 
plants and from a variety of other sources. Forty percent of the carbon 
that is produced in the United States comes from coal-fired 
powerplants. But if we are looking for a way to produce electricity in 
a way that is pollution free and carbon free, 70 percent of all the 
pollution-free, carbon-free electricity we have today comes from our 
nuclear plants. Six percent of our clean electricity comes from the 
Sun, the wind, and the Earth.
  One day it may be that we are able to make more of our electricity 
from the Sun, the wind, and the Earth. But at the moment, not much is 
available. It is expensive and the Sun is only available when the Sun 
shines and the wind is only available when the wind blows. If you are 
wanting to operate your computer, or manufacture an automobile in 
Illinois or Tennessee, or turn on your light at night, you don't want 
to have to pray that the wind is blowing or that the Sun is shining. 
You want reliable, low-cost electricity.
  In Tennessee, we are excited about the prospect of, one day, solar 
energy making a bigger difference in our electrical grid. In fact, two 
big new plants have moved into our State to make polysilicon, which is 
the product that goes into the solar cells that go on the top of your 
house. Each of those plants uses 120 megawatts of electricity. Where 
will they get that electricity? One reason they are in Tennessee is 
because the TVA supplies a lot of low-cost, reliable electricity. That 
comes from coal and nuclear power and a little bit from natural gas in 
our State. That is pretty much the way it is around the country. Solar 
power is not yet low-cost, reliable electricity. You can't run the 
plant making the solar energy products on solar power or wind power 
today. One day we may, but in the meantime, while we are trying to 
rebuild the auto industry in Michigan and Illinois and Wisconsin and 
Tennessee, we want low-cost, reliable electricity. We want our Alcoa 
plant to stay open in Blount County, in Maryville, where I am from in 
Tennessee. Why is it closed? The cost of the electricity. What will 
open it? A 20-year contract on low-cost, reliable electricity. If we 
say to the Alcoa plant: We will sell you a lot of wind power, they will 
say: But the wind doesn't blow in our area. If we say: We will sell you 
solar power, they will say: It is four times as much and we might like 
to operate a night shift and you can't store it.
  But what we will be able to say, in light of this new development we 
heard about yesterday--we can say to the Alcoa plant, we can say it to 
Eastman Chemical in Kingsport, we can say it to the two plants making 
materials for solar cells: We can move in a 125-megawatt nuclear 
reactor, put it near your site, and supply all the low-cost, reliable 
electricity you need.
  Another use for this new reactor could be to help us clean up our 
coal plants. We have a clean air problem in Tennessee, as does much of 
America. I am very much hopeful the Environmental Protection Agency or 
the Congress or some combination will reinstate the CAIR rule to deal 
with nitrogen and sulfur and mercury, for our health in this country.
  The small reactor might be used as a substitute for coal plants. Some 
of the coal plants we have in the TVA system and around the country are 
very old and very dirty. The newest ones are much more efficient and a 
lot cleaner. It might make sense to take the nuclear reactor, the small 
one, and put two of them together where an existing coal plant is. 
There are a lot of possibilities for this. Instead of 100 nuclear 
plants in 20 years, we may have another option. We may be able to have 
400 or 500 small nuclear reactors in 20 years. They may be 125 
megawatts here or two together or three together.
  My fellow Tennessean, Al Gore, who won the Nobel Prize for his 
campaign on the dangers of global warming, has a line he often uses 
about nuclear power. ``Nuclear power may have a role to play,'' Al 
says, ``but unfortunately, nuclear reactors come only in one size--
extra large.''
  Until yesterday, you couldn't disagree with the former Vice 
President. Ever since President Eisenhower beached a 65-megawatt Navy 
submarine reactor at Shippingport, PA, in 1967, under the Atoms for 
Peace Program, we have been building reactors bigger and bigger. Most 
of the ones on the drawing board today, as I mentioned, are at least 
1,200 megawatts. I believe we have 17 applications now for new nuclear 
powerplants. Also, one is being built right now and that is completing 
an old plant at Watts Bar.
  We have not built a traditional large nuclear power plant from start 
to finish in the last 30 years in the United States. That is quite an 
irony. We invented the technology. We have used it successfully since 
the 1950s and without incident in our nuclear Navy. Twenty percent of 
our electricity comes from our older plants, the ones we built more 
than 30 years ago. They produce 20 percent of our electricity today and 
70 percent of our clean electricity. But for 30 years we have not been 
building them.
  In the meantime, France--that we don't usually like to emulate--has. 
France is 80 percent nuclear, and they have among the lowest carbon 
emissions--that contribute to global warming--in the European Union and 
among the lowest electric rates in the European Union. They are even 
selling electricity to Germany, which has invested money in solar 
energy and windmills and stopped nuclear but has found they do not have 
enough electricity to keep their jobs.
  India and China, with our help, are building nuclear powerplants 
because they want clean, reliable electricity at a low cost.
  We have appropriated money to help do that and sign treaties to help 
do that. Now even our President said the other day that Iran has a 
right to build nuclear powerplants. Well, if Iran has a right to do it, 
why don't we do it? We invented it. We are the ones who want low-cost, 
clean electricity. Let's go ahead and do it. So it will be 20 years, 
but it takes a long time to get one of those projects through the 
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I mentioned there were 17 applications. 
It takes another 5 or 6 years after you get through the 2- or 3-year 
process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build these big plants. 
So that is a long ways.
  If you are a utility and all you really need is 300 new megawatts to 
meet growing demand, this new, more flexible approach--this smaller 
reactor--is going to lower costs and open the door to more widespread 
use of nuclear power. It will help us achieve the goal of building 100 
new nuclear powerplants in the next 20 years in order to deal with 
climate change.
  To those who are still skeptical of nuclear power, we must say, if 
global warming is an inconvenient problem, then nuclear power is the 
inconvenient solution.
  Babcock & Wilcox and TVA have shown us this new approach. They have 
proposed a reactor that can be built in a factory in 3 years, shipped 
to the site on rails, and fit together like Lego blocks. That is a very 
original idea. The larger reactors are still going to be necessary. We 
are going to need the power. But as B&W and the TVA have reminded us, 
there is more than one way to skin a cat. What we are seeing here today 
is what the business schools call a disruptive technology. I hope the 
public and the press will appreciate how the Tennessee Valley Authority 
is fulfilling its mission as a public utility by taking such a 
progressive stance on technology.
  America's nuclear technology has been falling behind. Of that, there 
is no doubt. The French, the Japanese, and the Russians are all selling 
reactors out in the world, to India and China

[[Page S6533]]

and other places. This is going to make them sit up and take notice 
because the concept we saw yesterday is perfect for developing nations 
that do not have the infrastructure to handle the larger reactors. It 
is perfect for small towns and factories all over America that may need 
only 125 megawatts and cannot afford something larger. It is what is 
called ``distributed generation''--producing electricity onsite instead 
of wheeling it from deserts or mountaintops hundreds or thousands of 
miles away. As the old saying goes, ``Small is beautiful.''
  One of the things we are going to have to face as we think about what 
kind of electricity we want for the future is the landscape of America. 
You know, landscape is a part of our environment as well, and the 
landscape becomes a real concern. When we look at the energy sprawl 
that could be created by some of the renewable energy projects, it 
takes a lot of space to produce a little bit of electricity.
  For example, a big nuclear plant can be located on about 1 square 
mile. That is one that produces 1,000 megawatts. To get that much 
electricity from biomass, which means woodchips or dead trees, you 
would need a forest the size of the Great Smoky Mountains National 
Park--that is 550,000 acres--and the number of trucks that would be 
coming in and out to haul the stuff in and back out would be in the 
hundreds every day. You would be talking about millions of tons of 
woodchips and dead trees a year. So that is for just one big nuclear 
plant equivalent of electricity. On the other hand, to create the same 
amount of electricity from wind turbines that you would get from one 
nuclear plant, you would have to cover about 270 square miles.
  In our part of the world, in the foothills of the Great Smoky 
Mountains, we do not really want to see these 50-story towers with 
blades that are as long as football fields, with flashing lights on top 
that can be seen for 20 miles. We do not want to see them along the 
foothills of the Smokies, and I doubt the people of Virginia want to 
see them along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I doubt they want to see 
them in Pennsylvania or in the White Mountains. And in the Eastern 
United States, they only work on the ridgetops, and they do not work 
very well. That is why there is only one wind farm in the entire 
Southeastern United States. It is in Tennessee and only operates 18 
percent of the time, and part of that time is at night when we have a 
lot of extra electricity. So that does not work very well.
  The Senator from California, Mrs. Feinstein, with whom I work on the 
Appropriations Interior Subcommittee, has expressed her concern about 
the size of the solar thermal plants proposed for the Mojave Desert, 
which she has tried to protect for years. They would have to be 5 miles 
on each side in order to get a decent amount of electricity, and that 
is only during the daytime.
  You have the wind and you have the Sun, but you still need either the 
coal plant or the nuclear plant. So I believe there is a place for 
wind: far offshore, the middle of Lake Michigan, or in parts of the 
wind corridor. I believe there is a great future for solar because 
solar power comes during the peak times, during the day when we can use 
it. Perhaps we can use our rooftops to provide the space. So we think 
that is more promising for our area. I think biomass is useful, but I 
have already expressed how large an area it would take to produce a 
little electricity. And we might be able to get a few hundred megawatts 
out of the Mississippi River by putting turbines in the water.
  So how are we going to reindustrialize America over the next 25 
years? How are we going to keep those auto suppliers and assembly 
plants and aluminum plants and even the new plants making solar in our 
country if we have sky-high costs of unreliable electricity? We need 
another option.
  While we are cleaning up the coal plants, while we are figuring out 
renewable electricity, we now have another way to skin the cat; that 
is, the small nuclear reactor, 125 megawatts. That is about the size of 
electricity that is produced by Fort Loudoun Dam in our State. It is 
significant, but it is a lot smaller than the big ones we are used to.
  What I really hope is that when Americans see this user-friendly 
reactor sitting underground--that is another aspect: A lot of it, 
including the storage of the waste, goes underground. Another aspect is 
it is only two stories tall. Most people think nuclear plants, the big 
ones--they see these big cooling towers. That is to cool the water that 
has to be used. But these small ones are air-cooled, so they don't use 
much water. That is a great advantage. And they are not an eyesore, 
they are two stories tall. I mean, remember, the wind turbines are 50-
stories tall, producing almost no electricity in a consistent way. The 
nuclear reactor is producing low-cost energy 90 percent of the time, 
and it is two stories tall.
  So I think with this development people may begin to rethink nuclear 
power. It is already happening out there. People are recognizing that 
the dangers of nuclear have been widely exaggerated, there is nothing 
to be fearful about, and once we realize that, we are going to see 
nuclear power for what it is: an appropriate technology that will 
enable us to meet our future energy needs without overwhelming the 
world with pollution and warming the planet.
  So I hope my colleagues in the Senate will join me in saying 
congratulations to Babcock & Wilcox and especially to the Tennessee 
Valley Authority for leading the country in this renaissance of nuclear 
energy. Congratulations, good luck, and I hope there are many of these 
projects on the drawing boards.
  This is the way for us to clean the air, deal with global warming, 
and at the same time have low-cost, reliable electricity in large 
amounts so that we can keep our jobs here.
  There is one other aspect to this that I ought to mention. As we talk 
about the different forms of energy, people worry that so much of what 
it takes to build the wind turbines or the solar plants or even the 
large nuclear plants, and how they may be manufactured overseas and 
that the jobs are there and not here. All of the jobs for the small 
nuclear reactors will be in the United States--virtually all of them. 
So this is not only American-made energy, all of the parts that go to 
building what I hope will be hundreds of these small reactors over time 
can be made and will be made right here in the United States.
  I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be allowed 
to speak as in morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Thune pertaining to the introduction of S. 1242 
are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')

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