[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 155 (2009), Part 13]
[Senate]
[Pages 17591-17593]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              CLEAN ENERGY

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I delivered an address yesterday at the 
National Press Club about the Republican plan for clean energy. We call 
it a low-cost clean energy plan. It begins with the idea of building 
100 new nuclear power plants in the next 20 years; electrifying half 
our cars and trucks in the next 20 years; exploring for natural gas, 
which is low carbon, and oil offshore--if we are going to continue to 
use oil, it might as well be our own--and then, finally, doubling our 
research and development budget, as President Obama has proposed, so we 
can have ``mini Manhattan Projects'' in renewable energy to try to 
reduce renewable energy technologies' costs and make them more reliable 
so they can contribute to our energy needs.
  I would like to make a few remarks today on our low-cost plan for 
clean, renewable energy and compare it with what is coming over from 
the House, which is a high-cost plan.
  Our country is at a critical point. The recession is the most severe 
in decades. Unemployment is nearing 10 percent. We have too much 
national debt. A gathering storm threatens the technological edge that 
has given Americans--only about 5 percent of the world's people--a 
remarkable standard of living that comes from producing 25 percent of 
the world's wealth. We remember last year's high oil prices. We know we 
are relying too much on other countries for energy. There is the 
unfinished job of cleaning our air, and, for many, the global warming 
of our planet is an urgent concern.
  It is against this backdrop that for the first time ever legislation 
dealing broadly with climate change and energy is coming out of the 
House. We are working on the same subjects in the Senate. The decisions 
we make will affect our well-being for years to come.
  The House has chosen the high-cost solution to clean energy and 
climate change. Its economy-wide cap-and-trade and renewable energy 
mandate is a job-killing, $100 billion-a-year national energy tax that 
will add a new utility bill to every American family budget.
  Republican Senators offer a different approach, a low-cost plan for 
clean energy based upon four steps: 100 new nuclear plants in 20 years, 
electric cars for conservation, offshore exploration for natural gas 
and oil, and doubling energy research and development to make renewable 
energy cost competitive. The Republican plan will lower utility bills 
and create jobs and should put the United States within the goals of 
the Kyoto protocol on global warming by 2030. Our plan should not add 
to the Federal budget since ratepayers will pay for building the new 
nuclear plants. Federal loan financing for the first nuclear plants is 
designed not to cost the taxpayers money, and nuclear plants insure one 
another. Offshore exploration should produce revenues through royalties 
to pay for programs

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to encourage electric cars and trucks; and doubling energy research and 
development should cost about $8 billion more per year, which is 
consistent with the President's budget proposals for 2009 and 2010.
  So in furtherance of that Republican plan, I have offered my own 
blueprint as one Senator about how to build 100 nuclear power plants in 
the next 20 years, and I am looking for support on the Republican side 
and on the Democratic side, in and out of Congress. For those who are 
watching and listening, I would like to have your comments and 
suggestions at www.alexander.senate
.gov.
  This is a good time to stop and ask: Just what are we trying to 
accomplish with energy and climate change legislation? What kind of 
America do we want to create during the next 20 years?
  Well, first, we should want to see an America running on energy that 
is clean, cheap, reliable, and abundant. In order to produce nearly 25 
percent of the world's wealth, we consume about 25 percent of the 
world's energy. We should want an America in which we create hundreds 
of thousands of green jobs, but not at the expense of destroying tens 
of millions of red, white, and blue jobs. In other words, it doesn't 
make any sense to put people to work in the renewable energy sector if 
we are throwing them out of work in manufacturing and high tech. That 
is what will happen if these new technologies raise the price of 
electricity and send manufacturing and other energy-intensive 
industries overseas, searching for cheap energy. We want clean, new, 
energy-efficient cars, but we want them built in Michigan and Ohio and 
Tennessee and not in Japan and Mexico.
  We should want an America capable of producing enough of our own 
energy so we can't be held hostage by some other country.
  We should want an America in which we are the unquestioned leader in 
cutting-edge, job-creating scientific research.
  We should want an America producing less carbon. I don't think we 
ought to be throwing 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the 
environment every year, so that means less reliance on fossil fuels.
  We want an America with cleaner air where smog and soot in Los 
Angeles and in the Great Smoky Mountains are a thing of the past and 
where our children are less likely to suffer asthma attacks brought on 
by breathing pollutants.
  Finally, we should want an America in which we are not creating 
``energy sprawl'' by occupying vast tracts of farmlands, deserts, and 
mountaintops with energy installations that ruin the scenic landscapes. 
The great American outdoors is a revered part of the American 
character. We have spent a century preserving it. There is no need to 
destroy the environment in the name of saving the environment.
  None of these goals are met by the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill. 
What started out as an effort to address global warming by reducing 
carbon emissions has ended up as a contraption of taxes and mandates 
that will impose a huge and unnecessary burden on the economy. 
Renewable energies such as wind and solar and biomass are intriguing 
and promising as a supplement to America's energy requirements. Yet the 
Waxman-Markey bill proves once again that one of the government's 
biggest mistakes can be taking a good idea and expanding it until it 
doesn't work anymore.
  Trying to expand these forms of renewable energy to the point where 
they become our prime source of energy has huge costs and obvious 
flaws. What is worse, it creates what some conservationists call ``the 
renewable energy sprawl,'' where we are asked to sacrifice the American 
landscape and overwhelm fragile ecosystems with thousands of massive 
energy machines in an effort to take care of our energy needs.
  For example, one big solar power plant in the western desert where 
they line up mirrors to focus the Sun's rays and which spreads across 
more than 30 square miles--that is more than 5 miles on each side--
produces just the same 1,000 megawatts you can get from a single coal 
or nuclear plant that sits on 1 square mile. And to generate the same 
1,000 megawatts with wind, you need 270 square miles of 50-story 
turbines. Generating 20 percent of our Nation's electricity from wind 
would cover an area the size of West Virginia.
  To those of us in the Southeast where the wind blows less than 20 
percent of the time, they say ``use biomass,'' which is burning wood 
products, sort of a controlled bonfire. That is a good idea. It might 
reduce forest fires and conserve resources, but let's not expect too 
much. We would need a forest a lot larger than the Great Smoky 
Mountains National Park to feed a 1,000-megawatt biomass plant on a 
sustained basis. And think of all of the energy used and the carbon 
produced by the hundreds of trucks it will take every day to haul the 
stuff to that one plant.
  Already we are beginning to see the problems. Boone Pickens, who said 
that wind turbines are ``too ugly,'' in his words, to put on his own 
ranch, last week postponed what was to be America's largest wind farm 
because of the difficulty of building transmission lines from West 
Texas to population centers. And the Sacramento Municipal Utility 
District pulled out of another huge project to bring wind energy in 
from the Sierra Nevada for the same reason. According to the Wall 
Street Journal, California officials are worried that the State's 
renewable mandates have created ``a high risk to the state economy . . 
. and that the state may be short on power by 2011 if problems continue 
to pile up.''
  Add to that a point that many forget: Wind and solar energy is only 
available about a third of the time because today it can't be stored--
you use it or you lose it. Solar's great advantage is that the Sun 
shines during peak usage hours, while the wind often blows at night 
when there is plenty of unused electricity. But with either, if you 
want to be sure your lights turn on or that your factory opens its 
doors when you go to work, you still need other power plants to back it 
up.
  Is this really the picture of America we want to see 20 years from 
now? There is a much better option. We should take another long, hard 
look at nuclear power. It is already our best source for large amounts 
of cheap, reliable, clean energy. It provides only 20 percent of our 
Nation's electricity but 70 percent of our carbon-free, pollution-free 
electricity. It is already far and away our best defense against global 
warming. So why not build 100 new nuclear plants in the next 20 years? 
American utilities built 100 reactors between 1970 and 1990 with their 
own (ratepayers') money. Why can't we do that again? Other countries 
are already forging ahead of us. France gets 80 percent of its 
electricity from 50 reactors, and it has among the cheapest electricity 
rates and the lowest carbon emissions in Europe. Japan is building 
reactors from start to finish in 4 years. China is planning 60 new 
reactors. Russia is selling its nuclear technology all over the world. 
We are helping India get ready to build nuclear plants. President Obama 
has even said Iran has the right to use nuclear power for energy. Yet 
we haven't built a new nuclear plant in 30 years, and we invented the 
technology. Why don't we get back in the game?
  There seem to be a couple of main things holding us back: first, a 
failure to appreciate just how different nuclear is from other 
technologies, how its tremendous energy density translates into a 
vanishingly small environmental footprint, and second, an exaggerated 
fear of nuclear technology.
  Many have forgotten that nuclear power plants were the result of 
President Eisenhower's ``Atoms For Peace'' program. The idea was to 
take perhaps the greatest invention of the last century and use it to 
provide low-cost energy to reduce poverty around the world.
  There is also a misconception that nuclear plants are uninsurable and 
can't exist without a big Federal subsidy. There is a Federal insurance 
program for nuclear plants called Price-Anderson, but it has never paid 
a dime of insurance. Today, the way it works is every one of the 104 
nuclear plants in

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the country can be assessed $100 million in damages for an accident at 
another reactor. So that is another factor adding to safety 
consciousness.
  Most reactors have revenue of $2 million a day, which pays for the $5 
billion construction loans and still makes possible low rates for 
consumers. For example, when the Tennessee Valley Authority restarted 
its Brown's Ferry Unit 1 reactor 2 years ago, TVA thought it would take 
10 years to pay off the $1.8 billion construction debt. It took 3 
years. When oil prices were skyrocketing, Connecticut proposed putting 
a windfall profits tax on the state's two reactors because they were 
making so much money.
  Nuclear power is the obvious first step to a policy of clean and low-
cost energy. One hundred new plants in 20 years would double U.S. 
nuclear production, making it about 40 percent of all electricity 
production. Add 10 percent for Sun and wind and other renewable 
sources. Add another 10 percent for hydroelectric, maybe 5 percent for 
natural gas, and we begin to have a cheap, as well as a clean, energy 
policy.
  Step two is to electrify half our cars and trucks. According to 
estimates by Brookings Institution scholars, there is so much unused 
electricity at night that we can also do this in 20 years without 
building one new power plant 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 three is to explore offshore for natural gas--it is low carbon--
and oil--using less, but using our own.
  The final step is to double funding for energy research and 
development and launch mini Manhattan Projects such as the one we had 
in World War II, this time to meet seven grand energy challenges: 
improving batteries for plug-in vehicles; making solar power cost-
competitive with fossil fuels; making carbon capture a reality for 
coal-burning plants; safely recycling used nuclear fuel; making 
advanced biofuels--crops we don't eat--cost-competitive with gasoline; 
making more buildings green buildings; and providing energy from 
fusion.
  We can't wait any longer to start building our future of clean, 
reliable, and affordable energy. The time has come for action. We must 
open our minds to the possibilities and potential of nuclear power. We 
have a clear choice between a high-cost clean energy plan coming from 
the House--one that is filled with taxes and mandates and a new utility 
bill for every American family, one that will drive jobs overseas 
searching for cheap energy--or we can enact our own cheap and clean 
energy policy and lower utility bills and keep jobs here and produce 
food here at a price that is low so Americans can afford to buy it.
  This is the sensible way to go: nuclear power, electric cars, 
exploration offshore, and doubling research and development. This 
policy of cheap and clean energy will help family budgets and create 
jobs. It will also prove to be the fastest way to increase American 
energy independence, clean our air, and reduce global warming.
  I hope those listening will let me know their thoughts about our 
blueprint for 100 nuclear power plants in the next 20 years. The way to 
do that is to visit www.alexander.senate.gov.
  I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Gillibrand). The Senator from New 
Hampshire.

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