[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 9388-9389]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          AMERICA COMPETES ACT

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, about a year ago, the United Arab 
Emirates decided to secure its energy future. The Emirates is a small 
Persian Gulf state that is awash in oil and annually rakes in about $80 
billion in oil revenues. For its own domestic energy needs, however, it 
opted to go with another technology--nuclear power. Its reasoning was 
that the oil in the ground will eventually run out and that it would be 
best to conserve and prepare for that day.
  The Emirates specified they wanted to build four nuclear reactors and 
estimated the costs at around $40 billion. Sure enough, the bids soon 
started coming in from the world's leading nuclear vendors. There was 
Areva, the company born out of France's nuclear effort--they now get 80 
percent of their electricity from nuclear and are building one of their 
new Evolutionary Power Reactors in Finland. There was Westinghouse, 
which is building its new AP1000 reactors in Japan and China. You may 
recognize the name. They were once, along with General Electric, 
America's leading electrical manufacturer. Now they are a Japanese 
company, bought by Toshiba in 2006.
  While these two giants dueled, a third competitor entered the field. 
South Korea only started building its own nuclear reactors in 1996. 
Before that they bought from the U.S. and the Japanese. But then they 
took an old design from Combustion Engineering, another American 
company, and fashioned the APR-1400. After building a few for 
themselves they entered the world market. Meanwhile, in the Persian 
Gulf oil business, the Koreans had established a reputation for getting 
things done on budget and on time.
  Still, it was a complete shock last October when the United Arab 
Emirates passed over bids from the world's two leading companies, Areva 
and Westinghouse, and awarded the contract to South Korea for $20 
billion--half the original estimated price. The French and the Japanese 
have gone back to the drawing boards to figure out what went wrong so 
they will be better able to compete next time.
  How did the Koreans come so far so fast? People will talk about 
``cheap labor,'' ``government enterprise'' and ``copycat technology.'' 
But I have another hypothesis. Year after year, Korean students are at 
the top of world performance in math and science while the United 
States doesn't even rank in the top 10. In the Program for 
International Student Assessment's math test for 15-year-old students, 
for instance, South Korea ranks third, behind Finland and Taiwan, while 
the United States ranks 21st. They are 75 points ahead of us on a scale 
of 1,000.
  We have been hearing about these statistics for decades--maybe we 
have even grown used to them--but now we are starting to see the 
consequences. We are a country that is falling behind the rest of the 
world in science literacy. In terms of energy, the rest of the world is 
currently going through a nuclear renaissance while we are barely able 
to construct new reactors in our own country. Part of our population 
still thinks a nuclear reactor is an atomic bomb that can go up in a 
mushroom cloud any minute. A larger number believes that if we cover 
the Great Smoky Mountains with windmills we could generate all the 
electricity we need without having to build either nuclear reactors or 
coal plants. I call this ``Going to War in Sailboats.'' That is the 
title of a book I have just written. If we were to go to war tomorrow, 
would we put our fleet of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers in 
mothballs and commission a fleet of sailing vessels?
  Four years ago Senator Jeff Bingaman and I asked the National 
Academies:

       What are the top 10 actions, in priority order, that 
     federal policymakers could take to enhance the science and 
     technology enterprise so that the United States can 
     successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global 
     community of the 21st century? What strategy, with several 
     concrete steps, could be used to implement each of those 
     actions?

  The Academies responded quickly to that request by assembling a 
distinguished panel, headed by Norman R. Augustine that quickly 
produced a list of 20 recommendations along with strategies in the 
report, ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm.'' That report was issued 3 
years ago. I think its message is even more immediate today.
  In response to the Gathering Storm report, Congress enacted and the 
President signed the America COMPETES Act in 2007, incorporating many 
of the Academies' recommendations and establishing a blueprint for 
maintaining America's competitive position. In the COMPETES Act we 
authorized funding to improve education in science, technology, 
engineering and mathematics. We increased funding for scientific and 
technological research. And we established ARPA-E--modeled on the 
Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency, the one that 
started

[[Page 9389]]

the Internet--but aimed this time specifically at advanced research 
projects on energy.
  Just 2 months ago I attended ARPA-E's Inaugural Energy Innovation 
Summit, at which more than 50 innovators from around the country 
presented the prototypes of what we hope will be the next generation of 
energy innovation.
  Some of these ideas are truly exciting. We saw designs for a ``Metal-
Air'' battery that could have a 1000-mile range that would be 10 times 
what our best car batteries can get today. We saw plans for converting 
waste gas from refineries to gasoline that could save us 46 million 
barrels of oil each year. We saw projects for using sunlight and 
electricity to convert carbon dioxide back to gasoline and a ``self-
digesting'' biofuels plant that uses enzymes to convert cellulose plant 
material to a gasoline substitute.
  But there are still other areas where we must forge ahead. What about 
these new small modular reactors? Companies like Toshiba, Babcock & 
Wilcox, and Hyperion all have plans for reactors that are so small they 
can serve as ``nuclear batteries.'' They are assembled at the factory 
and shipped to the site, where they are fitted together like Lego 
blocks. They have a lower cost of entry which is important for smaller 
utilities. We already have reactors like this aboard our submarines and 
aircraft carriers. We have done this for more than 50 years. Why not 
put a 125-megawatt reactor back in Oak Ridge, TN, where it would power 
the entire site and meet one-half of the Department of Energy's carbon 
footprint reduction goal? The people of East Tennessee are not afraid 
of nuclear power.
  With Senator James Webb of Virginia I have introduced a clean energy 
bill that calls for building 100 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 
years to secure our energy future while cutting our carbon emissions 
and keeping energy prices low. With Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and 
Byron Dorgan of North Dakota I have introduced a bill that would set up 
10 model communities around the country to develop the infrastructure 
needed to support electric cars. Forty Republican Senators support the 
proposition of electrifying half our cars and trucks as a way to reduce 
our carbon footprint even further and reduce our dependence on foreign 
oil. The recent tragedy of the oilspill in the gulf has only 
highlighted the need to begin this effort.
  Still, we have a formidable task ahead of us. In 2008, 1 year after 
passage of the America COMPETES Act, Norman Augustine wrote an article 
in Science Magazine. Since The Gathering Storm had been published, he 
noted, many new developments had occurred in science and education. A 
new research university was established in Saudi Arabia, with an 
opening endowment equal to what the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology had amassed after 142 years. 200,000 Chinese students were 
studying abroad, mostly pursing science or engineering degrees, often 
under government scholarships. Government investment in R&D increased 
by 25 percent--in the United Kingdom. An initiative was under way to 
create a global nanotechnology hub--in India. An additional $10 billion 
was being devoted to K-12 education, with emphasis on math and 
science--in Brazil. Another $3 billion was added to the nation's 
research budget--in Russia.
  So it is still a competitive world out there. A study done far back 
in the 1950s determined that 85 percent of the per capita income growth 
in American history has occurred, not because of increasing capital 
stock or other measurable inputs, but because of technological 
innovation.
  As educators and scientists, I know you are aware of how important 
your work is to America's economic future. And I am sure you are ready 
to join us in this effort.

                          ____________________