This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the American nuclear power industry. 

How we act to take advantage of this opportunity—more specifically, how the industry players respond to this opportunity—will have enormous consequences for the American energy sector, for our economy, for our national security, and indeed for the entire world for generations to come.

 That is why President Bush, Secretary Bodman, and the rest of us at the Department of Energy are doing everything we can to support and encourage the expansion of safe, emissions-free nuclear power.    

That commitment is most recently evidenced by the successful establishment and confirmation of a new Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy—the first time the head of nuclear energy at DOE has held that rank in 14 years.

I don’t think Dennis Spurgeon needs an introduction to this crowd, but if you’ll bear with me for a moment, I’d like to take this opportunity to brag about what I consider to be one of the Department’s best acquisitions in years. 

From his service with the U.S. Navy, to his time with the Atomic Energy Commission, and of course his distinguished work in the nuclear industry, Dennis has proven himself to be a talented manager and an enthusiastic advocate for nuclear power.  

The Secretary and I are pleased to bring an individual of his talent to DOE, and I know you will find him to be an energetic and helpful voice in the Administration.  

You heard the President outline his agenda for increased nuclear power a few moments ago. 

I’d like to elaborate on his vision by speaking to the three key elements of this Administration’s nuclear power policy agenda.  We want to do three things: 

1. Create an environment where new nuclear power plants will be built here in the U.S. as soon as possible.
2. License Yucca Mountain and move spent fuel.
3. Develop the advanced recycling technologies that will be necessary to a growing nuclear sector, and reorder the global nuclear enterprise to develop and implement a global fuel leasing and assurances regime…this is our proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.

All three objectives are complementary and necessary to the others.

But let me go back to the first point (and an essential first step to any real nuclear future)—this Administration’s commitment to the construction of new nuclear plants. 

Over the past few years, this Administration has sought to shape an environment more conducive to new nuclear plant construction.

In principle, we have worked to remove various barriers preventing new plants from being built here in the U.S.  For example, we are meeting our goals under the $1.1 billion Nuclear Power 2010 program, including having made good progress on Early Site Permitting and our successful work leading toward certified, standardized, plant designs. 

With the President’s signature on last year’s long-awaited Energy Policy Act, several other barriers were eliminated, and new incentives provided:

• The bill extended The Price Anderson indemnity program through 2025
• The bill made available federal risk insurance to the first six new nuclear plants.  (In fact, just last week our Department issued the interim final rule that establishes the two-step process for obtaining this insurance.)
• And the bill made available production tax credits and loan guarantees to further lessen the financial risk the first few movers may be exposed to.     

With these efforts, we believe we have gone a long towards creating an environment where new nuclear power plants will be built here in the U.S. as soon as possible.  That is step one, and it was an important one. 

This brings me to the second element of the Administration’s nuclear power policy agenda—licensing Yucca Mountain and moving spent fuel as soon as possible. 

This Administration is committed to doing just that, and has recently submitted to Congress legislation to enable us to fully implement the 2002 decision to build a repository at Yucca Mountain.

We have proposed in the legislation to eliminate the current statutory 70,000 metric ton cap on disposal capacity in order to allow maximum use of the mountain’s technical capacity, while continuing to provide for the safe isolation of the nation’s entire commercial spent nuclear fuel inventory. 

We also propose a more streamlined NRC licensing process and for initiation of infrastructure activities–including safety and other upgrades to enable earlier start-up of operations. 

Additional provisions are designed to consolidate duplicative environmental reviews, and reform the funding stream to ensure that the money from nuclear ratepayers goes directly to the project.

We have made significant improvements to the program during the last year.  And we are developing a licensing approach that we will be able to pursue with high confidence of success.  We have within our ability to pass the Yucca Mountain legislation and have the project on a success path before this Administration is over.  We must succeed.

This brings me to the third element of the Administration’s nuclear power policy agenda: Our proposal to develop the advanced recycling technologies that will be necessary to a growing nuclear sector, and reorder the global nuclear enterprise to develop and implement a global fuel leasing and assurances regime…this is our proposed Global Nuclear Energy Partnership.     

The President has stated a policy goal of promoting a great expansion of nuclear power—here in the United States, as I have discussed—but also around the world.  The reasons for this are obvious.  The Department of Energy projects total world energy demand to more than double by 2050.  Looking only at electricity demand, projections indicate an increase of over 75% in global electricity consumption in the next two decades.

Nuclear power is the only mature technology of significant potential to provide large amounts of completely emissions-free base load power to meet this need…. resulting in significant benefits for clean development, reducing world greenhouse gas intensities, pollution abatement, and the security that comes from greater energy diversity.

But nuclear power, with all of its potential for mankind, carries with it two enduring challenges: (1) what do we do with the increasing amounts of spent nuclear fuel? and (2) how can we prevent the proliferation of fuel cycle technologies that can lead to weaponization? 

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership seeks to address and minimize those two challenges by developing technologies to recycle the spent fuel in a more proliferation resistant manner and by supporting a reordering of the global nuclear enterprise to encourage the leasing of fuel from fuel cycle states in a way that presents strong commercial incentives against new states building their own enrichment and reprocessing capabilities.      

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership is really about identifying the policies, developing the technologies, and building the international regimes that would manage and promote a dramatic growth in nuclear generation in a way that enhances our waste management and non-proliferation objectives. 

Regarding our policy on spent nuclear fuel, the United States stopped old-form reprocessing in the 1970’s, principally because it could be used to produce pure plutonium.

But the rest of the major nuclear economies (France, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, and others) continued on without us.  We now have a world-wide buildup of nearly 250 metric tons of separated plutonium, vast amounts of spent fuel, and we risk the continued spread of fuel cycle technology.

In 1982, when our current Nuclear Waste Policy Act was first enacted, and in 1987 when it was significantly amended, the prospects for new nuclear generation where such that we could avoid a reconsideration of our government’s decision to abandon recycling of spent fuel.  But today, with good prospects for new builds, and an even greater need for new builds, we must rethink the wisdom of our current once-thru spent fuel policy.  We must move to recycling. 

We still need Yucca Mountain.  And Yucca Mountain is the best location in the US for a permanent geologic repository.  But the capacity of YM as currently configured will be oversubscribed by 2010.

Think about this, if nuclear power remains only at only 20% of U.S. electricity generation over the course of the century, we will have to build the equivalent of 9 Yucca Mountains. 

This Administration believes the wiser course is to recycle the used fuel coming out of the reactors, reducing its quantity and radiotoxicity so that only one Yucca Mountain will likely be required. 

To be successful in this endeavor we seek to develop and demonstrate the key enabling technologies in partnership with other nations that possess the full elements of the fuel cycle.  We will seek to:

• Greatly accelerate our work in the research, development and demonstration of advanced recycling.
• Pursue the R&D that will allow us to produce and qualify actinide-based fuel.
• And demonstrate at engineering scale an advanced burner reactor to extract the energy potential out of recycled fuel, while reducing the radiotoxicity of the waste in repeated cycles.

But we will also seek to work with those nations to establish a Reliable Fuel Services Framework under which fuel supplier nations would choose to operate both nuclear power plants and fuel production and handling facilities, while providing reliable fuel services to user nations that choose to operate only the nuclear power plants themselves. 

In exchange for the assured fuel supplies on attractive commercial terms, the user nations would have to agree to suspend any investments in enrichment or reprocessing. 

Other crucial elements of GNEP include R&D on the use of small reactors worldwide, particularly in the developing world, and the development and promotion of advanced safeguards and best practices.

In conclusion, we are proposing that the United States lead the transformation to a new, safer and more secure approach to nuclear energy…an approach that brings the benefits of nuclear energy to the world while reducing vulnerabilities from proliferation and nuclear waste. 

We are in a stronger position to shape the future if we are a part of it.

Of course challenges remain in demonstrating the GNEP technologies.  But without bold action, the world will have more plutonium, more spent fuel, more proliferation, more carbon and less energy at home and abroad.

In closing, nuclear power is not a silver bullet, but it is part of a broader energy strategy that when combined with advancements in energy efficiency, clean coal, carbon sequestration, and renewables, can and will make a difference in the security, environmental, and energy challenges we face. 

Now most of the words in this speech have been dedicated to what the government is doing.  I think that is an appropriate topic for a speech from me.  But I know, as you know, that it is really not the government that has brought us to the doorstep of the nuclear renaissance.  More than anything, the safety and operational record of the industry over the last decade have put nuclear power back on the table. 

And it will not be the government that will make the nuclear renaissance happen.  We have our role–to shape the playing field, provide regulatory certainty, meet our spent fuel obligations, and pursue the R&D and international arrangements to shape a more rational nuclear future.  But it is you…it is you – the industry…the investors…the builders.  Only you have the power to really make it happen.  

The President, Secretary Bodman, and I have only 977 days left to build momentum for the energy policy course I have outlined here today.  It is in the national interest, and I believe, in the industry interest. 

Let me conclude by congratulating you for holding this important conference.  I think history will bear out the importance of this time.   

Thank you for your attention, and for the invitation to share my thoughts with you this morning.