Chu Underlines Obama Administration’s Support For Nuclear Energy
Written by NucNet
Friday, 10 July 2009
US energy secretary Steven Chu told a Senate panel this week that he supports the role nuclear energy can play in reducing carbon emissions.
According to the US Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) Mr Chu told the Senate environment and public works committee: “Restarting the nuclear power industry is very important in our overall plan to reduce carbon emissions in this country. “From me you are not going to get any reluctance. As you may know, I think that nuclear power is going to be a very important factor to getting us to a low-carbon future.”
Mr Chu continued: “The Department of Energy is doing with its tools everything it can to restart the American nuclear industry. With the loan guarantees, we are pushing as hard as we can on that.
“We are going to be investing in the future in bettering the technologies and, quite frankly, we want to recapture the lead in industrial nuclear power. We’ve lost that lead ss we’ve lost the lead in many areas of energy technology, and we need to get it back.”
Republican senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee told the committee that if the US really wants to deal with global warming, “we really only have one option and that is to double the number of nuclear power plants we have”.
He said: “There is no other technological way to have a large amount of reliable, cheap electricity other than nuclear power. So if we’re in the business of saying, yes we can, if the president would give the same kind of aggressive interest to building 100 new nuclear power plants that he does to building windmills, we could solve global warming in a generation.”
