I commend President Obama on his nuclear energy initiative to provide loan guarantees for a pair of US nuclear reactors in Georgia. This is an important step in producing clean domestic energy. As he said, “If we fail to invest in the technologies of tomorrow, then we are going to be importing them.”
Transparency and risk monitoring are essential as we move forward but under strict safety conditions, nuclear power can reduce our carbon footprint. Nuclear energy plants produce electricity through the fission of uranium instead of the burning of fuels thereby reducing pollutants in the air.
I do realize that we still have to deal with the nuclear waste issue. I was a supporter of the Yucca Mountain repository when I was in Congress. Now that Yucca Mountain is no longer viewed as an option for storing reactor waste, I am hoping the new Presidential Commission on America’s Nuclear Future under my friend, former Congressman Lee Hamilton’s effective leadership, will come forward with necessary solutions to addressing the ongoing problem of handling nuclear waste so that it doesn’t threaten the environment and people living around the facilities and storage sites. We can come up with solutions to this problem and nuclear energy plants can provide the United States with much needed energy solutions.
Finally. I hope the Commission will study new generations of nuclear energy systems that are now in various stages of planning and development. The new reactors will feature so-called passive safety systems that do not require human intervention in the case of an accident. Some will operate at sufficiently high temperatures to produce hydrogen from water as well as electricity. Experts say the new systems will be more economical to build, operate, and maintain than current generations of nuclear reactors.
Tom McMillen