Obama going nuclear

In what was a surprise (but not a surprise) announcement, President Obama stated that he would extend $8.3 Billion in loan guarantees to build two new nuclear power plants. The US hasn’t built a new plant in three decades due to the fallout (pun intended) over the Three Mile Island incident. Fear over another nuclear accident scared a lot of people over the risks associated with nuclear power.

Back in 2008, Obama stated that he wanted to have “1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars … on the road by
2015,” a goal that would require a large supply of new energy reserves. Current power output barely keeps up with existing demand, with California experiencing rolling brownouts from time to time during the summer. A million cars requiring electricity from the grid to charge them would require new plants.

Unfortunately for Obama, these new nuclear plants won’t be online for some time due to the required application review process and construction, making it impossible for there to be enough supply for one million plug-in hybrids. Of course, this point is moot when you consider the collapse of the automobile industry as well as the down economy. When you couple that with his call “reduce electricity demand 15 percent from projected levels by 2020,” there was no way he was going to achieve his goal to begin with, but campaign goals and slogans are rarely realized.

I praise Obama for following through on a process begun two years ago, though it is likely we won’t see a full repayment on these loan guarantees in the future. The high rate of loan defaults make me question if this is the right avenue to go down for future nuclear plant projects. We need to find a way to make the process more competitive in order to drive down construction prices. It might simply be a need to get back into the business of building the plants in general to make the construction process routine. Or maybe we need to consider a different style of nuclear plant, such as a pellet reactor that is more stable and operates at lower temperatures.

In the mean time, look forward about seven years. Hopefully we’ll see two new plants coming on line and taking a small bite out of our demand on foreign energy resources as well as preserving more of our environment.