Energy package unveiled

Benjamin Grove

Monday, Feb. 26, 2001 | 11:25 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- America needs to boost energy production -- including nuclear power -- and launch new conservation initiatives to dig the nation out of an "energy crisis," leading Senate Republicans said today.

The nuclear industry could be considering plans for a new nuclear power plant within 18 months, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said today at the unveiling of a sweeping bill that outlines a comprehensive energy policy for the nation. Democrats also have drafted an energy bill, which does not rely on nuclear power increases.

"The United States cannot sit by and say we don't need this (nuclear)," Domenici said. "We do need this."

But Nevada lawmakers are cool to the idea of increasing nuclear power output as long as the Energy Department is marching forward with a plan to bury high-level nuclear waste from the nation's 103 commercial reactors at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said he generally dislikes the tenets of the Republican bill that benefit the nuclear power industry. Those sections include new research and development money; industry incentives for increased efficiency; and the establishment of a Spent Nuclear Fuel Research office to oversee research in treatment, recycling, and disposing of nuclear waste.

"Unless we can work out something on nuclear waste, I would oppose (nuclear power increases)," Reid said today.

Reid also opposes a cornerstone of the energy bill that calls for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlfie Refuge, which many Democrats say is too sensitive environmentally. Reid predicted Congress will not support the Alaskan oil drilling strategy.

The bill's author, Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the "environmental footprint" that a drilling operation would make in the refuge would be minimal.

Murkowski, a longtime supporter of the congressional plan to bury the nation's nuclear waste in Nevada, has been working on the bill for months. He wants to decrease dependence on foreign oil. Only a comprehensive energy policy will support a U.S. economy that is so energy dependent, he said.

Among the bills numerous approaches: more effective management of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; tax incentives for heating oil, natural gas and propane storage; tax credits for alternative-fuel vehicles; tax credits for geothermal and hydropower; and money for research into advanced clean-coal technology.

"We think that this is a balanced energy plan," Murkowski said at a packed press conference attended by dozens of reporters.

The bill has Republican Senate Leader Trent Lott's blessing. The Mississippi lawmaker said the nation had an energy crisis on its hands that was 20 to 25 years in the making because of lack of planning. He said he hoped the bill would pass as early as this summer.

President Bush has not yet weighed in on the plan and may tinker with it, Lott said. So will other lawmakers, Democrats said.

"You have to start someplace," Reid said. "This bill is a starting point."

The nuclear power industry has much at stake in the new Congress. No new nuclear power plants have been commissioned since the 1970s because of concerns about waste and nuclear disasters.

But the energy "crisis" along with political support could change that. Nuclear power leaders say the nation needs more nuclear power plants, which produce "environmentally friendly, low-cost bulk electricity."

"This (bill) will help encourage the new nuclear power plant construction that our nation needs," said Joe Colvin, president and chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's top lobbyist and trade association.

NEI spokesman Steve Kerekes said there is a "new excitement" in the industry in recent months about the future of nuclear power. New plants could be built soon -- likely this decade, Kerekes said recently.

"Our expectation was that no matter who was president, nuclear energy has to be part of a diversified energy portfolio in this country," Kerekes said.

Many environmentalists, worried about waste transportation and the dangers of storing 77,000 tons of waste at a single site, oppose an increase in nuclear energy.