Nuclear industry, TVA get boost during Senate hearing
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate lawmakers said Thursday it’s time for the nation to invest more heavily in nuclear power, and praised the Tennessee Valley Authority for doing its part.
“I think as the price of gasoline goes up and the difficulty of burning coal cleanly increases, people are going to come to the common sense solution that if we already are producing 20 percent of our electric power through nuclear power plants, why don’t we increase that?” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who chaired an Energy Committee hearing on the issue.
Alexander praised TVA for moving toward restarting a nuclear reactor at its Browns Ferry power plant in Athens, Ala. Alexander noted that it would be the first new nuclear capacity in the United States since the mid-1990s.
TVA plans to have the facility up and running by 2007 at a cost of about $1.8 billion. TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough testified that the plan was on budget and on time.
No utility has sought permission to build a brand-new nuclear power plant since the 1979 reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
However, the nuclear industry is examining sites in Virginia, Mississippi and Illinois as places that might be suitable for building new plants, testified William Travers, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s executive director for operations.
Alexander said he is interested in pushing nuclear power plants because they don’t increase the kind of pollutants that come from coal-fired plants, which generate most of the nation’s electricity. Alexander said he would like to see TVA get rid of some of its old coal-fired plants and put two other mothballed nuclear facilities to use, in addition to the Browns Ferry reactor.
McCullough said the completion of the Browns Ferry facility will give TVA all the capacity it needs through 2014. But he told Alexander, “You will see the expansion of safe, reliable nuclear,” in the future.
Environmentalists say nuclear power produces waste that is not easy to dispose.
President Bush decided in 2002 to select a ridge of volcanic rock 90 miles from Las Vegas, known as Yucca Mountain, as the place to entomb 77,000 tons of used reactor fuel from the nation’s commercial power plants. Congress affirmed Bush’s decision.
Alexander and Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M, said they don’t see waste disposal as an issue that should stop the production of more nuclear power.
An energy bill being debated in Congress would provide industry incentives to boost nuclear power production in the United States.
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