Bush Administration Goes Nuclear

April 28th, 2005

Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.

From the Financial Times Wednesday:

“President George W. Bush will on Wednesday throw his support behind a worldwide expansion of nuclear power and announce plans for a new generation of oil refineries and natural gas terminals in the US… In addition to increasing capacity, Mr Bush believes nuclear power can also be part of the solution to climate change because it does not produce the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.”

From President Bush’s speech referred to by the FT,

“I’m looking forward to going to a G8 meeting in July in Great Britain. And there I’m going to work with developed nations, our friends and allies to help developing nations, countries like China and India to develop and deploy clean energy technology… With these technologies, with the expansion of nuclear power, we can relieve stress on the environment and reduce global demand for fossil fuels. That would be good for the world, and that would be good for American consumers, as well.”

Here is what we said a month ago (just in time!), “All of this looks to me like the Bush Administration is working towards some sort of major new initiative or announcement on nuclear power, all but certainly linked to the climate issue. Such an announcement would be responsive to Tony Blair’s calls for the U.S. to become more engaged in the climate issue, and would also raise some difficult issues for Bush’s historical opponents on the climate issue. The upcoming G8 meeting in Scotland in July would be a perfect opportunity to announce such an initiative.”

Now get ready for that debate.

3 Responses to “Bush Administration Goes Nuclear”

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  1. Crumb Trail Says:

    Big Wednesday

    See Bush Administration Goes Nuclear at Prometheus, which excerpts an FT story and the Bush speech it was about that clearly stated the intent to promote nuclear power, something that Prometheus had been expecting. I suspect that we all…

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  3. kevin vranes Says:

    I’m all for nuclear, but the irony is thick. On google news right now, under “US News” are three headlines:

    1- “Briton found guilty of aiding terrorism”

    2- “President Bush Touts Nuclear Power in Energy Plan”

    3- “US Says More Terrorist Groups Are Seeking Deadliest Weapons”

    No doubt it’s a very solvable engineering question whether we produce lots of new nuclear without the more worrisome byproducts. The real question is, will we bother? The follow up is, once we’ve gone to more nuclear power, will the feds do anything to try to store the byproducts securely?

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  5. R Says:

    None of the waste will ever be “permanently” buried at Yucca mountain. The plans for the repository envisage keeping it “open” for several hundred years. There is too much energy in the “waste” to throw it away. Yucca Mountain is just a temporary site till the political will develops to support reprocessing the spent fuel. Even the fission products are too valuable to throw away…