Nuclear power is key to U.S.’s future electricity supply

Even from the bottom of what they’re calling the Great Recession, it is clear that America will have to generate roughly 40 percent more electricity in the next 20 years if we’re to keep up with people’s needs and ensure long-term national prosperity. Fortunately, we know how to do it. Unfortunately, we’re not acting on that knowledge.

The straightforward, unavoidable “how” is the expansion of nuclear power. Its broader deployment will get what nearly everyone says they want most — more safe and affordable power and less carbon dioxide — regardless of where they stand in the global warming debate.

It looks like the hard part will be convincing the Obama administration’s appointees on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to consider licensing the new reactors that would be necessary. The commission staff is thought to be looking at the safety and environmental aspects of as many as a dozen license applications. But the NRC’s chairman, Gregory Jaczko, has explained that the commission might finish work on only one before 2012.

Meanwhile, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Information Administration assume nuclear power will expand in order to meet the mandates of the proposed cap-and-trade, anti-global warming legislation that is taking shape in the House and Senate.

Americans live lives powered by electricity. As advances in technology, manufacturing, communications and consumer products have made our country more productive than ever, we have begun to consume more power than ever. Clean-coal technology and lower natural gas prices would help, and many say that alternative energy from the sun, the wind, the waves, or even geysers and/or trash will provide the necessary power, even though they contribute only about 2 percent of our power today.

What’s left after considering coal, gas and the promising alternatives is nuclear power. Even someone like the founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, seems to recognize the facts. He told Congress 90 percent of all electric utility reduction in carbon dioxide emissions since 1973 came from nuclear power, and said it was “the equivalent of taking 100 million automobiles off the road.”

On the other end of the spectrum in Washington, the Nuclear Energy Institute recently wrote to tell me this: “The nation’s 104 reactors produce 72 percent of all carbon-free electricity across America, and … existing nuclear energy facilities and new, advanced designed nuclear plants are, and will be, a critical part of a comprehensive electricity supply system that increases all carbon-free energy sources.”

NEI puts the jobs created by building new nuclear plants in the tens of thousands.

Right now, nuclear power plants account for approximately 20 percent of America’s electricity. The first barrier to nuclear power is bureaucracy of the sort that Chairman Jaczko is practicing. The second is the waste, which has been piling up all over the country for years while the foes of building a central repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, have stalled it. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) asked the pertinent question during a hearing of my committee: “If you can’t put nuclear waste in the middle of a mountain in the middle of a desert, where can you put it?”

A prosperous future for America requires that we do more than nothing on nuclear power. We need to build the repository, accelerate research on new nuclear power technology, and drop the bureaucratic impediments to licensing new power plants.

That way, the plants we need can get sited, built and operated safely, and Americans will be able to keep their jobs, heat their homes and pay their electric bills.

Barton is the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.