Increase Nuclear Power Use

Nuclear power is currently used to generate about 20% of the total electricity we produce each year and increasing its use will play an important part in our efforts to achieve energy independence.  We currently have 104 licensed and operating nuclear reactors at 66 nuclear plants in 31 states.  The last new nuclear plant brought on-line was Watts Bar in 1997 and it took 23 years and $8 billion to get it into operation due to latent concerns by the public and opposition by vocal activists related to two main issues; safety and waste disposal.  Nuclear power must be an integral part of our primary electrical energy backbone, eventually relegating some  of the older fossil fuel based facilities to standby and peak loads.

Safety issues from 20 or 30 years ago have long since been addressed by the introduction of new technology, automated control systems, and new or updated reactor designs that automatically fail-safe without human intervention or that are passively safe and cannot go critical under any circumstances. Waste disposal is and will remain something of an issue until a long term storage repository is finally opened.

Our objectives are to increase the production of energy using nuclear power by at least 50% as soon as possible and to decrease the volume of highly radioactive waste requiring long term protection and storage.  In order to accomplish this, the following actions are required:

Public education and outreach
Public service advertising and infomercial type programs should be used to educate the public about the risks, safety record, and benefits of using nuclear power instead of fossil fuels.  This will help to alleviate lingering concerns and help to minimize opposition to an expansion of nuclear power use.

Support the "Nuclear Power 2010" program
Nuclear Power 2010 is a program designed to provide incentives for bringing new nuclear capacity on-line.  It includes a new and more streamlined licensing system, cost sharing for overruns caused by regulatory delays, tax credits for the first 6,000 megawatt hours produced, liability limits, and other inducements that make the extremely expensive licensing and construction process less risky.  Thus far, the program has been successful in attracting proposals for 24 new commercial reactors and 9 license applications have already been filed.

Complete previously approved construction
There are three construction permits that are still valid for reactors on which construction was halted years ago.  Provide special incentives for them to be completed and brought into operation or include them in the Nuclear Power 2010 program incentives.

Encourage power uprating and co-generation at existing nuclear plants
The cheapest and quickest way to add more total electrical generating capacity from nuclear power is to uprate existing plants and it should be strongly encouraged with appropriate incentives.  Uprating involves obtaining approval to increase the maximum power level at a reactor by increasing the operating temperature.  Co-generation of additional energy using waste heat (e.g. electricity, hydrogen, steam) should also be strongly encouraged at any plants where it is not currently employed with accelerated depreciation or other incentives.

Resolve the nuclear waste storage problem
A long-term storage repository for the large quantities of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel that currently exist is mandatory.  Yucca Mountain has been a work in progress for decades, it is the single most studied piece of real estate on the planet, and it needs to be completed and opened as soon as possible.  Failure to open Yucca Mountain on time (1998) and begin storing nuclear waste there has cost the U.S. taxpayers several billion dollars already and that cost will increase by about $500 million a year until it finally begins accepting deliveries.

Complete the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)
IFR reactors can use the spent fuel rods from conventional nuclear plants for their fuel and reduce the volume of highly radioactive and long-lived nuclear isotopes by over 95% in the process.  The high temperatures generated in an IFR are useful in cost-effectively producing hydrogen or using other co-generation methods to significantly increase efficiency.  We must complete the IFR prototype that was canceled in 1994, build several more, and then use them to reduce the volume of high level radioactive waste requiring long-term storage.  Incentives, in addition to those in the Nuclear Power 2010 program, will be required to entice commercial construction of IFRs.  This is because they are more expensive to build, other reactor designs may produce more electricity, and they require a reprocessing facility to prepare the spent fuel from conventional nuclear plants or plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons to be used as fuel in the IFR.  The most obvious additional incentive is free fuel, but even over the lifetime of the plant it would not offset the higher initial construction costs, so others inducements will be appropriate.