Say Watt, Senator?

Say Watt, Senator?
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 06, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Energy Policy: Barack Obama wants a million electric cars on the road by 2015. Where's he going to plug them in? John McCain has the answer — a renewable energy source called nuclear power.

Speaking Tuesday in Lansing, Mich., Sen. Obama set a goal of putting 1 million plug-in gas-electric hybrid cars, capable of getting 150 miles per gallon of gasoline consumed, on the road by 2015.

To help power them, Obama also said he wanted 10% of our electricity to come from renewable sources by 2012 and 25% by 2025.

Actually, about 20% of our electricity already comes from a renewable resource — nuclear power — and John McCain wants to up that percentage significantly.

Obama has opposed increased use of non-polluting nuclear power and the reprocessing of spent fuel rods into new fuel, not to mention the storage of radioactive waste in the geologically safe and stable facility being built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Unlike Obama, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats now on vacation — as in the vacation their constituents increasingly can't afford because of high energy costs — John McCain is for all forms of energy, as long as they're produced domestically.

"We all know nuclear power isn't enough and drilling isn't enough," McCain rightly said Tuesday, as he stood in front of the cooling towers of Michigan's Fermi II nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie near the Ohio border. "Solving our national energy crisis requires an all-of-the-above approach."

DTE Energy's Fermi II, named for Enrico Fermi, the first physicist to split the atom, is one of three nuclear plants in Michigan that supply about 25% of the state's electrical needs. McCain wants to build 45 new nuclear power plants nationwide by 2030 to meet a demand for electricity that is expected to rise 25% by then.

McCain recalled his service aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and noted: "I knew (nuclear power) was safe then, and I know it's safe now." As he has pointed out, U.S. sailors have sailed aboard nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for more than five decades without ill effects or accidents. No American sailor, past or present, glows in the dark.

Safety and waste-storage concerns have been mentioned by Obama as reasons he is not a nuclear proponent. No doubt nuclear critics inside and outside his camp will say, "Wait a minute! Didn't the Los Angeles-class nuclear power submarine USS Houston leak radioactive water earlier this year?" Yes, it did, about the same amount of radioactivity as a 50-pound bag of fertilizer emits.

Since the U.S. Navy commissioned the world's first nuclear-powered sub, the USS Nautilus, in 1954, there hasn't been a single nuclear reactor accident on any of its nuclear-powered vessels. There currently are 102 nuclear reactors aboard 80 Navy combat vessels.

"Sen. Obama has said that expanding our nuclear power plants 'doesn't make sense for America,' " McCain said at Fermi. "He also says no to nuclear storage and reprocessing. I couldn't disagree more.

"I have proposed a plan to build additional nuclear plants. That means new jobs and that means new energy. If we want to enable the technologies of tomorrow like plug-in electric cars, we need electricity to plug into."

As Nicolas Loras and Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation note, uranium is considered a finite resource like coal and oil, but it can be recycled and reused. It's a renewable resource, and the French, the British and, yes, even the Japanese recycle their spent nuclear fuel.

Using the French method of reprocessing, the U.S. could recycle its 58,000 tons of used fuel to power every household for 12 years.

As even Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder who gained prominence in the 1960s by opposing nuclear testing, told a House committee in April 2005: "Nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand for energy."

Barack Obama, call your office.



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