[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 12]
[Senate]
[Pages 16823-16825]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             NUCLEAR POWER

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, health care is not the only issue 
before the Senate. We have the nomination by the President of a 
distinguished jurist, Judge Sotomayor. Hearings will begin next week on 
whether she should be confirmed for the Supreme Court.
  Tomorrow, the Senate, in the Environment and Public Works Committee, 
begins discussion on climate change and global warming--a subject we 
have talked about a lot. The House of Representatives has made that an 
issue by passing, about 10 days ago, another one of these bills that by 
all reports no one in the House of Representatives read before it was 
passed--1,200 pages served up the day before they voted. They voted and 
sent it on over to us. So we have energy and climate change to deal 
with, which is the subject of my remarks this afternoon.
  My question is this: Why is Congress and, to a great extent, the 
administration ignoring the cheap energy solution to global warming--
nuclear power?
  Consider this: No. 1, coal-burning powerplants produce about 40 
percent of carbon, and carbon is the principal greenhouse gas causing 
global warming. That is the first fact.
  Second, nuclear powerplants, which produce only 20 percent of all of 
our electricity in America, produce 70 percent of our carbon-free, 
pollution-free electricity.
  So coal-burning powerplants produce 40 percent of the carbon, and 
nuclear powerplants produce 70 percent of the carbon-free electricity, 
and our goal is to get rid of the carbon to slow down global warming. I 
think that is the goal anyway.
  So if that is the goal, if global warming is your issue, why not 
build 100 new nuclear powerplants during the next 20 years to deal with 
it? Nuclear power costs less than one-half cent per kilowatt hour to 
produce, which means it

[[Page 16824]]

is cheap enough to pay for building the plants and will still leave 
electric rates low.
  The rest of the world seems to understand this a little better than 
we do in the United States today. France gets 80 percent of its 
electricity from nuclear and has among the lowest carbon emission rates 
and electricity prices in the European Union. The United States--our 
taxpayers--is helping India and China build nuclear plants. Japan is 
building one nuclear plant a year. The President has even said that 
Iran has the right to build nuclear powerplants. But the United States 
has not built one new nuclear plant in 30 years, even though we 
invented the technology.
  So instead, the House of Representatives, 10 days ago, chose the 
high-cost solution to the climate change energy dilemma, narrowly 
passing an economywide so-called cap-and-trade bill, the Waxman-Markey 
bill. This is a job-killing $100 billion a year new national energy 
tax, which would add a new utility bill to the budget of every American 
family.
  The House also mandated the use of solar and wind power, which is 6 
percent of our carbon-free electricity. Remember, nuclear is 70 percent 
of our carbon-free electricity. So the House, ignoring nuclear, says: 
Let's expand solar and wind, which is 6 percent of our carbon-free 
electricity, even though both are more expensive and more unreliable 
since solar and wind power cannot be stored today, which means you have 
to use it when the Sun shines and the wind blows. Wind, especially, 
barely works in some parts of the country, such as the Southeast.
  So the choice is between a high-priced or a low-priced clean energy 
strategy. I think we all want a clean energy future, but do we want a 
deliberately high-priced clean energy future or a low-priced one? High 
pricers want taxes and mandates. Cheap energy advocates--almost all 
Republicans in Congress and some Democrats, and I hope a growing 
number--say build nuclear plants and double research to make renewable 
energy cheaper and reliable. High-priced energy sends American jobs 
overseas looking for cheap energy. I see that in all of the auto plants 
we have in Tennessee, and the auto suppliers. They are operating on a 
very thin margin. Add a little cost and those cars and trucks are built 
in Mexico and Japan instead of Tennessee and Michigan.
  Cheap energy not only creates jobs, it will reduce global warming 
faster than taxes and mandates. Here is why: 100 new plants in 20 years 
would double U.S. nuclear production, making it more than 40 percent of 
all electricity production. Add 10 percent or so for Sun and wind and 
biomass, another 10 percent for hydroelectric, and we begin to have a 
cheap as well as a clean energy policy.
  Some predict renewable sources will be 20 percent of electricity in 
20 years. I predict it will be about half that, after Americans 
understand its costs and its lack of reliability and they begin to see 
what some conservationists are calling the ``renewable energy 
sprawl''--50-story wind turbines along the foothills of the Great 
Smokey Mountain National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway and the 
Shenandoah Valley and solar thermal plants 5 miles wide next to 
national parks, all with big new transmission lines. Plus, since the 
Sun shines and the wind blows only about one-third of the time--
remember, you can't store it--we will still need nuclear plants for 
base load power.
  Step 2 for a clean and cheap energy policy is to electrify half our 
cars and trucks. There is so much unused electricity at night, we can 
also do this in 20 years without building one new powerplant if we plug 
in vehicles while we sleep. This is the fastest way to reduce 
dependence on foreign oil, keep fuel prices low, and reduce the one-
third of carbon that comes from gasoline engines.
  Step 3 is offshore exploration for natural gas--that is low carbon--
and oil. We should use less but use more of our own.
  Finally, we should double energy research and development to make 
renewable energy such as solar more cost competitive.
  Obstacles to nuclear power are diminishing. Used fuel can be stored 
safely onsite for 40 to 60 years while scientists figure out the best 
way to reduce its mass and recycle or reuse it. New plants can be one-
tenth the size and one-tenth the cost of the big ones we are accustomed 
to today and can be put together at an American factory and shipped to 
the site and assembled like Lego blocks--all of this American made--and 
with air cooling towers, not water cooling, and the towers are only two 
stories tall.
  I have introduced legislation to deal with global warming ever since 
I came to the Senate, but I am not in favor of economy-wide cap and 
trade. It is unnecessary. It is complex. It has unintended 
consequences. Our economy can't tolerate it. A simpler way to do it 
would be to focus on smokestacks, tailpipes, and find alternative ways 
to deal with the coal and the oil we want to use less of. We have that 
with tailpipes, cars, and trucks. We can shift to electric cars and 
trucks and the cost to the consumer will be as low or lower as they 
plug in at night to electricity. We also have that with smokestacks. We 
can shift some of our dirtiest coal plants to nuclear power, and 
instead of increasing the cost of energy, we could keep it steady or 
probably reduce it. So why would we want to deliberately proceed with a 
high-cost energy strategy when cheap energy is the key to our national 
security, to rebuilding our economy, and the key to so much of what is 
important to America's future?
  There is an old rule of thumb that sometimes in government we take a 
good idea and expand it until it doesn't work. I am afraid we are doing 
that with renewable energy--which is a good idea--the idea of putting 
up your own windmill in your backyard, put some solar panels on your 
roof, use biomass, and cut your energy costs and cut your use of fossil 
fuels. That is a good idea, but it is only going to produce a small 
percentage of what we actually need to run a country such as this which 
uses 25 percent of all of the energy in the world.
  Biomass, for example, to produce the amount of energy that one 
nuclear powerplant produces, you would have to forest continuously an 
area the size of the entire Great Smokey Mountain National Park, which 
is 550,000 acres. To produce enough electricity to equal a nuclear 
powerplant from solar power you would have to cover an area about the 
size of 270 square miles, and that is 5 or 6 miles on each side. The 
same with wind, or the same with hydroelectric, and we are not going to 
be building any big, new reservoirs anymore of that size.
  So we should take what we can get in appropriate places of wind and 
solar and biomass. We should put a few turbines in the Mississippi 
River and pick up some megawatts for the TBA, for example, but that is 
a few hundred megawatts for a system that needs to produce 27,000 
megawatts of reliable, low-cost, clean electricity every year.
  The only technology we have available to produce large amounts of 
clean, reliable electricity in the next 20 years is nuclear power. We 
invented it. We know how to use it. The rest of the world is taking 
advantage of it. Why don't we? Especially in this economy, when we have 
nearly 10 percent unemployment, when in Tennessee and Virginia and in 
the Midwest we are trying to find ways to rebuild the economy, when we 
know that cheap energy is the key to new jobs and that high-priced 
energy drives jobs overseas looking for cheap energy, why are we 
ignoring the cheap energy strategy for dealing with global warming, 
cheap energy based on nuclear power, No. 1; electric cars and trucks, 
No. 2; offshore drilling for natural gas and oil which we are still 
going to need, and pushing ahead with mini Manhattan projects in energy 
research and development to figure out renewable energy and help make 
it cost competitive while we move ahead?
  This is not only the fastest way to increase American energy 
independence, clean the air, and reduce global warming, it is the best 
way to help strained family budgets and a sick economy with 10 percent 
unemployment.
  I thank the President, I yield the floor, and I note the absence of a 
quorum.

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  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. NELSON of Nebraska. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that 
the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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