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Energy: Bush, “Go Nukes”, outlines incentives

Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer US
Published : 26 May 2006 19:15

"For the sake of economic security and national security, the United States should aggressively move forward with the construction of nuclear power plants," said President Bush at the Pottsdown, PA Limerick Generating Station nuclear plant.

Bush described a strategy of insurance incentives, loan guarantees and tax credits, and to encourage development. The last nuclear plant built in the US was the Callaway station in Missouri, which began operations in 1984

The Bush White House sees the US as behind in nuclear generation. The US garners 20 percent of its electric power from nuke plants, while France generates more than 75 percent.

At odds is, as usual, nuclear waste. While nuclear power is emission free, its resultant waste is difficult to be rid of. Currently stored at 126 sites around the nation, these materials are a result of nuclear power generation and national defense programs. In July 2002, Bush signed House Joint Resolution 87, charging The Department of Energy to obtain the Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to proceed with Yucca Mountain. Yucca Mountain is located in a remote Nevada desert, on federally protected land about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Bush in his talk at the Limerick Station called himself a "believer” in a planned nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain.

The US’s 102 nuclear plants keep spent fuel pools, increasingly viewed as a potential terrorist target. Proponents of the single-repository plan reason that, for example, a plane targeting a nuclear plant could spread that waste for miles; a plane targeting a mountain, even with the waste of 126 sites buried deep within it, could do little damage.

A Reuter’s story contrasted Bush’s visit and comments with former presidential rival Al Gore’s criticism, and the opening of the film “An Inconvenient Truth.” “Truth” is a documentary on global warming, in which Gore blames the Bush White House for inaction on greenhouse gases and global warming. Interestingly, the US declined to sign the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases in 1997, during the second Clinton administration. Some estimates were that the US would have to remove 1/3 of its automobiles from the road to reduce greenhouse gas levels to 1990 levels by 2010, as the Protocol stipulates.

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