[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Page 13460]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     EXTENSION OF MORNING BUSINESS

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, do I understand that the time for morning 
business expires at 3 o'clock?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. That is correct.
  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to extend that for 
an extra 10 minutes.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, while my colleague from Alaska is still in 
the Chamber, let me bring her some good news, as one on our side who is 
a strong advocate for nuclear power and who believes it is incredibly 
important that we do it safely. I chair the Senate Subcommittee on 
Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, and, as she mentioned, we have now, I 
think, 17 applications to build 26 new nuclear powerplants. I think we 
have $18 billion in loan guarantees.
  One of the things we have done this year is we have taken off the 
time restriction on the loan guarantees so they can go beyond the next 
couple of years, if needed. Hopefully, they won't be needed, but at 
least the amount of money will be there and available for a number of 
years.
  Another piece we had put in the stimulus package was a provision that 
says that not only can renewables--solar, wind, geothermal, and all the 
rest--be able to participate in the manufacturing tax credits to 
create--if you will, manufacture--the components of solar, wind, 
geothermal, but also nuclear. If we are going to build 26, 27 new 
nuclear powerplants in the next decade or two, I sure don't want to be 
getting the components from China, South Korea, Japan, or someplace in 
Europe. We should get the components from manufacturers that are here, 
and part of the stimulus package has been designed to do that.
  The other thing I would mention regarding cap and trade on climate 
change, if we actually take that approach--and my hope is we will--just 
by its very nature, being a producer of electricity but not one that 
creates carbon dioxide, money will flow in the cap-and-trade approach 
to utilities which use nuclear energy, which will develop more nuclear 
energy.
  So I appreciate the concerns the Senator from Alaska raises.
  I might add that just 3 weeks ago, I hosted a roundtable at MIT, near 
Boston, and we brought to the table some of the smartest people 
around--from MIT and from Harvard--who focused a lot on spent nuclear 
fuel and what to do with it. As you know, a lot of the fuel rods, I am 
told, still have 80 or 90 percent of the energy in the spent fuel rods. 
One of the questions I asked was, What should we do about it? Yucca 
Mountain is on hold for now. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear a 
unanimous opinion from everybody there who said, for now, maybe for the 
next 30, 40, 50, 60 years, even longer, the spent fuel rods, which are 
stored on site with our nuclear powerplants in dry cask storage, are 
perfectly adequate in terms of providing security and safekeeping for 
the spent fuel.
  In the meantime--and I would hope the Senator would join those of us 
who are advocates of nuclear power, would also understand we need to 
address the spent fuel issue, and would work with us to help fund 
technology for reprocessing and recycling to make sure we don't wait 50 
or 60 years to do that but we get started a lot sooner.
  So it is not all gloom and doom, but I appreciate the concerns the 
Senator from Alaska has raised and very much look forward to working 
with her on these issues, as we do on so many others, hopefully to good 
effect, and I thank her.

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