Hearing of House Subcommittee on Energy and Resources: the Role of Nuclear Power Generation In a Comprehensive National Energy Policy
HEARING OF HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND RESOURCES: THE ROLE OF NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION IN A COMPREHENSIVE NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY
April 28, 2005
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Mr. Issa. Good morning. My opening statement always says, ``A quorum being present.'' It takes two for a quorum here, so we will skip that line. I have an opening, and I am going to put it in the record and be very brief. If the ranking member arrives before we begin testimony, that would be better. However, I don't want to abuse you of your time, and I definitely want to very much hear what you have to say and get to questioning. I can assure you we have had enough members respond that they will be here for Q&A, which seems to be the direction that Members prefer. So we will get to that as quickly as possible.
The reason for this hearing today is that our Nation's electricity demand continues to rise while, in fact, production from nuclear sources does not. According to the Department of Energy, 41 new 1,000 megawatt nuclear plants will be needed by the year 2025 just to maintain nuclear power's 20 percent share of our Nation's electricity generation. However, there hasn't been a new nuclear power plant built in three decades. There are none presently licensed to be built, and without re-licensing, or essentially extensions of their lives, a significant amount of capacity will go offline by 2025.
The growth in electricity demand, coupled with the retirement of older generation plants, means the Nation will need 281 million kilowatts, to put it in kilowatt terms, of new generation capacity--enough to power the State of California, which, of course, is the world's sixth largest economy if it were a separate nation. I always get that into every one of my opening lines, as a Californian.
I think it is important that we hear from you today about the role that nuclear power should play in America's future because we have oversight and because we are steering ourselves into a train wreck. And I think if there is any message that I would like to hear today, it would be what are the ramifications of our not acting. And as each of the distinguished individuals and I were talking about earlier, I think we also touched on the areas of global warming and our participation in it, and I hope that that will also come up.
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Mr. Issa. Thank you, Dr. Moore.
As is my policy, I will waive my opening questions until all the other panel members have theirs, but I will tee up the discussion with just two items: one, in concert with yours, Dr. Moore, no person in the United States has ever died in a civilian nuclear power accident, period, including Three Mile Island, which cannot be said, obviously, for everyone driving gasoline, oil, and all the other petrochemicals down the road; nor can it be said either of liquified natural gas or refineries, all of which have had fairly spectacular loss of lives over the years.
Last, it is estimated that had the United States built all the nuclear power plants which were on order in the late 1970's, when they all became canceled directly as a result of Three Mile Island, we would presently be in Kyoto compliance. And I personally strongly suggest that had we already been in Kyoto compliance, the willingness of Congress to ratify Kyoto might have been dramatically greater than when we were on a collision course for no such opportunity.
With that, I would recognize the ranking member for her questions.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. Issa. Thank you.
I have good news and bad news. The good news is it is only one vote. The bad news is we will stand adjourned for about 5 minutes, until we go over and come back and renew questioning. I know our committee structure will support any cost of coffee or soft drinks you would like to have while we are gone.
With that, we stand recessed.
[Recess.]
Mr. Issa. One nice thing about being chairman, if you can be patient to get your questions in, you will get your questions in. I will now recognize myself for as much time as I will consume--there will be Members coming back here shortly--and I have a list of them.
First of all, Mr. Jones, would it be all right for us to include your entire study in the record? You have no objections? I would like to have it submitted in the record.
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Mr. Issa. I am not sure that officially we coordinated, but it certainly was timely.
With that, I would like to lead off with my first question. And probably, Dr. Moore, I suspect I have a lot of questions for you, but I am going to go to our other two from the standpoint of equal time. You are looking a little lonely there. This is both for Fertel and Jones.
The blend of financial incentives that you talked about in your study that is up here, the President's proposal was for four nuclear power plants to be funded. When I look at the eight, I can certainly see where you get down to eight, you are down to 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour, to put it in the ratepayer's terms, which means it is competitive with fossil fuel, without accounting for the advantages to zero emissions generation.
It seems your study concluded that you needed to get to eight. Are you and the President talking essentially two different visions of the same thing, getting us through those what we used to call non-recurring expenses?
Can you characterize where there may be common ground or whether there is a difference of four power plants between the proposals?
Mr. Jones. Yes, sir. The President and I seem to be speaking off the same page. In Table 1, right here to my right, your left, by the time we get down to the fourth or fifth plant, we are well within the competitive range with fossil generation. So the President and the Chicago study are in perfect agreement on that number.
Mr. Issa. Mr. Fertel.
Mr. Fertel. I think, Mr. Chairman, first of all, the President's discussion yesterday, which we welcome--and this is about the fifth time since the State of the Union he has spoken out positively on nuclear energy, which is clearly very encouraging to us.
Mr. Issa. The first time he did it timely for my hearing, though.
Mr. Fertel. We thought he did it intentionally for your hearing. We thought you had orchestrated that, and really appreciated the timing.
What the President said yesterday, he actually talked less incentives for these four plants than a risk insurance, which is something that the chief executive officers, because of the experience they had in the previous licensing process, have raised with Secretary Bodman and with the White House a number of times now as something that they felt was very important. And to be honest, if you demonstrated the licensing process worked on four plants--put aside the economic incentives--we think that you would have a track record that would give both the financial community and the boards of directors the confidence that the licensing process is disciplined.
We are actually pretty optimistic the licensing process, as it is being reshaped, will be not only protective of health and safety, but actually pretty reasonable in how you implement it. But it hasn't been demonstrated. So I think that four plants for that is clearly a very adequate demonstration. And I think that as Don pointed out, we think you get pretty economic pretty fast these days.
Mr. Issa. Excellent. I will also ask that a poll done in my own district, at government expense, which shows approximately 80 percent of my constituents favor adding an additional reactor where we have two working reactors at San Onofre. And I will provide that in the next 5 days so it gets in the record. That doesn't mean that there aren't 20 percent who didn't say yes, but certainly I don't get 80 percent in my district, so I always assume it is an awfully good sign when something is more popular than I am.
Sticking to our nuclear experts, per se, on production, the President yesterday seemed to be talking about Generation 3.5, and not Gen 4. Could you characterize the differences and the advantages? Because I think you are talking Gen 3.5 here too.
Mr. Fertel. Our current reactors, if you sort of just baselined them and said that the 103 operating reactors we have today are Gen 3, if you just took that as a baseline--and let me go first out to Gen 4, which is a program that the Department of Energy has ongoing right now, and has been ongoing for probably about 5 or 6 years. It is looking at both new advanced fuel cycles, liquid metal fuel cycles, high temperature gas fuel cycles, and reactors that will be commercial. It may vary in people's minds, but their commercial timing is probably in the 2030, 2040 timeframe, for really commercializing the reactors.
So, for instance, our Nation is looking to move ahead in Gen 4 space to build a very high temperature gas reactor, helium being the gas that they are talking about. And it has some very significant advantages if you make it work right. First, it is a high enough temperature that you can actually produce hydrogen chemically with it, so it is a good source for producing hydrogen.
It also is very efficient because of the high temperature, so rather than the 30 to 32 percent efficiency for producing electricity today, you might get as high as close to 50 percent. It also has the potential, because of the way you would design your fuel, that you could never melt the fuel, so you could never have the type of accident you protect against from our current reactors, so it moves down that road. But that is a Gen 4 type reactor, and we are doing that internationally with other folks.
Mr. Issa. Is it also true--I am terrible with these leading questions--that helium type production would also be able to be put completely underground?
Mr. Fertel. Actually, the General Atomics design is below ground, that is true. That is true. You could design it that way. Or, again, you could design it aboveground, as they are looking at for some of what they call pebble bed reactors.
Mr. Issa. I only ask that because obviously in our other hearings we are constantly dealing with the question of terrorism and airplanes strikes and so on.
Mr. Fertel. The Gen 3.5 is actually--you can think of Gen 3.5 in two types of designs that basically exist today, and in fact are operational in some countries. One design is what we call an evolutionary design; it is taking our current plants and moving them to where technology is right now. So I have gone to digital systems rather than analog systems. I have taken everything I have learned on my current plants and moved it both from a technology and operational perspective going forward. I have also done a bunch of things that are smarter in how I am going to maintain my plant for operational activities, so what I have learned when I have run into interferences in lay-down areas, I have now built it in so it is better.
So it is an evolutionary design. It doesn't take the technology at all, it is still a light/water reactor design, it works the same as my current plants, it is just moved along in technology to where we are today or where we think we can be, and it has taken up all the lessons learned from the operation of current plants.
The other Gen 3.5 that we have is we have moved to what we call passive designs. We call both of these advanced light/water reactors. We did message testing and passive designs, which the engineers thought was great. Passive design is if I can move the water by gravity rather than a pump and motor, why don't I do that? So if I need water to get to here, rather than pumping it from here to here, why don't I have it flow downhill to that? Pretty simple.
Mr. Issa. Meaning a pump failure is no longer a catastrophic failure.
Mr. Fertel. That is right. One, I eliminate equipment, so I save some money because I don't need as much equipment; and, two, I decrease the failure modes from a safety standpoint. So basically you have gone to passive designs for moving water around or for heat convection.
Now, I was kidding on passive, because the engineers thought passive was great. We did message testing with the public, and the public's reaction to passive was it sounded like it didn't do anything when it got into trouble and, oh my God, that sounds terrible. So we had to drop passive.
Mr. Issa. So it is now called self-healing?
Mr. Fertel. We will try that one. We just call it advanced. But that is what you have in 3.5, you have an evolutionary design, then you have a design that is basically trying to eliminate failure modes and equipment if I can do it through any sort of natural processes. And both of those designs right now are being licensed or have been licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The evolutionary design is actually operating in Japan; they have two large General Electric advanced boiling water reactors operating in Japan right now.
Mr. Issa. One followup question on that line, which is we are known in America for being the most eclectic nuclear producer; we have no two plants that you can walk into that look alike. And I know from safety studies that has been one of the problems. You train for the plant you are at because we built them one off in most cases. Would this 3.5 provide, if you will--and this is terrible to say--the airbus type cockpit, to where people and inspectors would have significant improvement in the ability to learn one, inspect, or operate all?
Mr. Fertel. The very short answer is yes. The whole intent going forward is to sort of implement the French model, which is standardized families of plants, and basically say if I am going to build the advanced boiling water reactor or, in this case, the economic simplified boiling water reactor, which is what they are marketing in our country, you would build a family of those, they would be identical.
If I were an operator at one and the chairman was an operator at another one, it wouldn't matter which control room we walked into. Same thing on maintenance, and even going down, if we could, we would like to keep the equipment tandardized, to the degree we could, so that you could basically have common inventory and safe money on supplies.
Your observation on our industry, which I did grow up in in a bit, it was sort of the American way, because in France they had----
Mr. Issa. The American way before Henry Ford.
Mr. Fertel. I mean, in France you had one electricity company, you had one reactor supplier, you had one fuel supplier, and they were all owned by the government. So when the government made a decision you should do something, everybody kind of marched to the same road. In our case, basically every utility wanted something slightly different than their brethren, and every supplier saw those as out of scopes. So capitalism here created a myriad of different plant designs.
But, no, the answer to your question is going forward we are doing to go with standardized designs.
Mr. Issa. Excellent.
One more question that I had which was peripheral, but you touched on it. The 2025, 2030, 2040, about the time we want to be a hydrogen economy, the next generation, Gen 4, produces significant amounts of hydrogen. How significant is that? What does it really relate to from a standpoint of providing it as a fuel or for other industrial uses?
Mr. Fertel. You mean as far as the nuclear role in that?
Mr. Issa. Right. If we were to begin rolling out that next generation, let us just say in 2020, and ramp up to where, by 2050, that was the standard, these more efficient, and it were producing our entire base load, how much hydrogen would it produce that theoretically is going to be used for driving automobiles?
Mr. Fertel. I don't know quantitatively the answer, but what I can tell you is you won't use the plant for dual purposes, in all likelihood. You would probably build the high temperature gas reactors that would produce hydrogen for you, and you would produce high temperature gas reactors that are going to produce electricity.
There may be certain times where you might be able to use it for a dual function, but in talking to at least the Department of Energy folks and the industry folks that are looking at it, they are saying that if you really are going to produce hydrogen in the quantities that you are going to need, you are going to dedicate the plants to doing that.
Likewise, if you are using the plants for electricity, and the value of the plants for electricity would be they are smaller; I can build them in increments in a more competitive electricity market, as opposed to the large plants we build right now. But it sounds like you would have separate plants. Though they would be capable of doing both, you probably wouldn't build them, or at least most of them, to do both.
Mr. Issa. Is there any other practical way to produce the quantity of hydrogen necessary to move our entire fleet of automobiles and trucks on hydrogen? Is there any other practical way to do it?
Mr. Fertel. The other practical way is you are basically using fossil fuels to split them to get hydrogen, and then you are burning. It is sort of counterproductive to produce emissions to reduce emissions. So we don't think so. There are honestly people at the national labs who aren't sure that even using nuclear to produce hydrogen is the right thing, that is the answer to our problem; not the nuclear, but the hydrogen.
But clearly in talking with folks, if we are going to produce large quantities of hydrogen, nuclear seems to be a way that we should seriously look at trying to do it, and I think that is why our Government has decided that the Gen 4 reactor they want to look at is the very high temperature, because they see the dual value, and that is why the Idaho folks want to see a reactor built there to try and begin to demonstrate its use in that mode.
Mr. Issa. And, Dr. Moore, as an expert on this whole sustainability question, how do you see that playing, as far as looking, to a great extent, beyond our careers, into the 2040 timeframe? Is this sensible or, as you were so good in pointing out, if not this, then what? Is there an ``or what'' that you can see on the horizon?
Mr. Moore. Well, again, I haven't done the math thoroughly on it, but it is very obvious to me that there is no other non-CO
The other option is that hybrid technology will come in and be with us for 40 or 50 years before there is a change to another technology from that. That is another possibility. Another possibility is that someone will eventually invent a battery or electrical storage device where then you could use the nuclear energy to charge the vehicle directly, rather than having to make hydrogen.
It is not just the making of the hydrogen that is technically difficult with the idea of going to a hydrogen fleet. Then you have to distribute it. It is very corrosive. Then you have to figure out how to get enough of it into an automobile to make it go 300 miles. And they still haven't figured that out yet. GM is experimenting with 10,000 psi tanks, and you still can't get enough in there and still have room for your suitcase in your car. So there are quite a few technical obstacles besides the manufacturing of the hydrogen.
But once again, as with power generation, there is no other technology that we know of today that can make the kind of dent in fossil fuel reliance that we are thinking about in terms of both CO
Actually, in the break we had a discussion about conservation. I know that subject was mentioned fairly high up in the President's speech yesterday, and, of course, that has to be a central part of a comprehensive energy policy. I know that is not what we are here to talk about today, but just to go on record----
Mr. Issa. Dr. Moore, we wouldn't have invited you if we didn't want to be complete in dealing with nuclear versus alternatives, so please feel free to elaborate.
Mr. Moore. Conservation is an across-the-board thing, it doesn't matter how you are producing the electricity--and in all other energy areas as well--it doesn't matter what your fuel is, the issue of conservation has to do with efficient use. For example, we could probably turn half the lights off in here, nearly all of them, and open up the curtains and conserve the electricity that is being used to light this room right now.
Mr. Issa. They don't trust Congressmen in the dark.
Mr. Moore. They do in the light?
Mr. Issa. Well, forewarned is forearmed.
Mr. Moore. But suffice it to say that conservation is a very important part of this whole thing, and that the United States is not exactly the world's leader in conservation of energy.
Mr. Issa. Although I will mention that California is the Nation's leader in conservation of energy.
One question I have, nuclear is a great base load because, as we all know, it doesn't turn on and off quickly. Geothermal obviously has a little more flexibility, but it is still inherently a base load. Wind, you get it when you get it; solar, you get it when you get it. If I go through all the zero emissions fuels, it would appear that hydro is the only large-scale zero emissions that is demand-oriented, turns on and off very quickly.
And each of you could participate in this. If nuclear were the answer for 100 percent of what its capacity is, how do you see it fitting in? What is its maximum? We always hear about France, for example, that believes they are at their maximum, which is about 80 percent. Where is the maximum for nuclear before you simply are in that problem that it is a base load only and peak has to come from some other source?
Mr. Fertel. First of all, just to put our system in perspective with the French system, the amount of generation we have from nuclear power plants in this country, the kilowatt hours that keep the lights on is larger than France and the next largest nuclear country after them, Japan, combined. So going to what Patrick said, we consume a lot of electricity in this country.
In France, they actually do load follow. Now, they follow a load, they basically are either at full capacity or they will go down as the load goes down. They also export a lot of electricity, their nuclear electricity, to make money off of it to other European countries.
I think, in our country, the strength of the system continues to be the fact that you do have a different technology. I think you will always--probably not always, but at least in my lifetime--have combustion turbines for peaking. You operate them a couple percent a year. So they are there; they burn a lot of gas when they operate.
I was telling Patrick during the break that if you take a 1,000 megawatt plant--we have built 280,000 megawatts of gas since 1992 in this country. That is why gas is such a problem. And we built 14,000 megawatts of coal and nuclear since 1992. That gives you a perspective of what we have been doing. And if you take a 1,000 megawatt gas plant, combined cycle, and say it operates its base load, 1,000 megawatt plant uses as much gas as 1 percent of the Nation's residential use; 1 percent of the
Nation's residential use. It sucks gas if you use it as a base load plant. But using it for peaking, it only operates a couple percent.
So I think, Mr. Chairman, what you would have, at least in the horizon we look out at--and we support conservation and efficiency. We as a Nation need to do more, and prices help us do more in this country. Industry leads that and commercial follows it, and residential customers lag it. But fundamentally high prices will drive more conservation and efficiency.
But I think we are going to burn coal. We are going to need clean coal. I mean, we have loads of coal, 250 years worth of coal, probably, so we will continue to do it. We have just got to do it smarter and begin to do less of it.
Nuclear is 20 percent right now. If I had my druthers, we would grow to probably double that or more. But that is a long time to do, because we have 900,000 megawatts on this grid. I mean, it is a monster electricity system in this country. I mean, it is just huge. And it is sort of the lifeblood of everything we do in the Nation.
So I think you are going to have, at least for the lifetime of most of the people we care about and know about today, you are going to need a mix, and you are going to still use gas, but you shouldn't use it for anything but peaking. And I wouldn't even use it for intermediate down the road because I think it has other more important uses in other processes.
I think that we still need to use clean coal and I think we should increase renewables and we should increase nuclear.
On renewables, I think the critical thing I mentioned to Patrick is you need to develop storage. Your comment on wind is right; you only get electricity when the wind blows. And if you had some storage techniques, you could have electricity longer. The only storage technique we could come up with was pump hydro, which used to be a storage technique if you looked it up
with a hydro facility. But we don't have many new hydro facilities in this country. So I think you still have a mix.
Mr. Issa. Marvin, in the energy bill there is a pump storage station for 500 kilowatts.
Mr. Fertel. It is probably megawatts.
Mr. Issa. 500 megawatts, thank you. 500 megawatts twin turbine in my district. It is the fourth time that I have put it into a bill. We are going to get there but, in fairness, the FERC has gone through the process and is in a preliminary stage. But it is one of those areas where I am very familiar that the 1,500 feet of rise over a very short period of time doesn't occur just anywhere.
So the ability to produce it in our Lake Elcinor area is a pleasant opportunity. It happens to also be exactly the point where the southern California power outage was caused by a lack of about half of that much power to be available at peak. And I always try to make that point.
Yes, please, Patrick.
Mr. Moore. Just a couple points on the demand issue versus intermittent. One of the problems with the word geothermal, geothermal refers to two completely separate technologies; it refers to the type of geothermal you have in California, where you get down into deep hot vents and you are basically producing steam to run turbines. Iceland has a big system like that.
It happened when the Department of Energy in Washington decided to take on ground source heat pumps, and some people had already started calling it geothermal or earth energy at that time. They didn't want to create a new department, so they lumped ground source heat pumps in with the geothermal department, so they are both called geothermal. And it was a big mistake in terms of public understanding, because not only is all this stuff happening, it is invisible; it is in your basement and under the ground. But now people are thinking geothermal, I thought that was what they do in California or New Zealand or Iceland.
Mr. Issa. Noted. I am going to force myself to change. I will tell you that I was fortunate enough going to ANWR by ground vehicle at my own expense. We talked about travel earlier. I took my family up because I wanted to actually drive the Tundra and experience it and get a real feel, because it is a serious consideration to expand into that wildlife and natural refuge.
But the strange thing is decades ago, when they were putting in the pipeline above ground, they were faced with the fact that, with heating and cooling, the pipe would have broken periodically, except they used ground source heat pumps, zero electricity consumed. I think it is ammonia-based in their case--don't hold me to that--but they came up with the whole concept that exactly when they needed cooling for the ground, they had a heat source in the air, and vice versa.
So they were able to maintain the permafrost year-round on the Alaskan pipeline. And the environmentalists who took us on this trip were very proud that this was a zero outside energy and environmentally probably the most responsible thing that they could come up with, in addition to all the other success stories of the pipeline.
If I can switch for a moment, one of the interesting things I discovered in preparing for this hearing was the old expression of swords into plowshares, and how that could relate to next generation nuclear. I have estimates that just the weapons grade uranium, not plutonium, that is available and that the Russians would be happy to sell us, would represent about 5 years of powering all of our nuclear power plants at the present time, and obviously we have the benefit of taking it offline.
And then a followup--since I see Marvin going, yeah, I can answer this one--if we had Gen 4, which can burn plutonium--and General Atomics I believe is the one that has this--what would be your estimate of the value based on the separate plutonium stockpile, that is also massive?
Mr. Fertel. In 1992 President Bush signed an agreement with the Russians to basically take 500 metric tons of high-enriched uranium that they had in warheads. This was not surplus sitting somewhere, which they also have, apparently, but this was actually coming out of warheads, so it was actually dismantling warheads and taking high-enriched uranium out and blending it down. Basically what we use in power plants is low-enriched uranium, which is somewhere less than 5 percent enrichment; it cannot blow up. High-enriched uranium for weapons is well above 92 percent. So you blend it down, you get a lot of nuclear fuel out of it.
Right now, 10 percent of the electricity in this country is generated as a result of weapons material in Russia being dismantled. We get about half the fuel for our reactors coming from Russia, and that has been going on now and it is going to go through 2013, then this particular trench of 500 metric tons ends.
And the question from our industry standpoint is do we get another trench. We know they have much more weapons material. They are getting paid for this, this is actually a system where initially, when it started, it was probably one of the largest revenue sources Russia was getting. Now, they are a lot more commercial, they are getting money for selling gas to Europe and oil to others.
But Megatons to Megawatts is a very successful program being implemented by USEC, which is a Maryland company here that used to be part of the Department of Energy, and it is a really good program. Now, we don't know what they will do with the rest of their material, whether they will sell it to us, whether they will use it to sell reactors to other people and throw it in as a fuel deal----
Mr. Issa. Comes with a full tank of gas.
Mr. Fertel. Comes with a full tank of gas, right. Whatever they can do. But we know they have a lot more stuff, and it is important just commercially. And I know the chairman being a businessman would appreciate this: on our side the industry that mines uranium, when you get weapons material, you are basically displacing uranium, you are displacing the conversion to make it into something else, and then the enrichment part, because you are getting it as a fuel, you are getting it as a final product.
Mr. Issa. Kind of like emptying out Fort Knox could depress the gold market.
Mr. Fertel. That is right.
Mr. Issa. If there was anything left at Fort Knox.
Mr. Fertel. That is right. And also, if you were emptying it, you probably wouldn't be mining for gold, because you would know that is coming on the market. Well, that is a problem for our side because the primary producers need to know if it is coming so they know what kind of production facilities they need to build. It is a real issue for making business decisions.
On plutonium----
Mr. Issa. Marvin, I assume, then, your message for us is we should be, as soon as possible making that commitment, but we should also recognize that we wouldn't want to provide 100 percent for 5 years and thus lay off a whole industry.
Mr. Fertel. To be honest, you could even do 100 percent for 5 years in this country. I wouldn't recommend that. What you need for the business decisions--and, again, I am sure you understand this--is certainty. You need to know how much is coming when so that the primary producers can make business decisions on when they can finance stuff and build it. And we would advocate the sooner we could get a decision from Russia, the better off we as a Nation would be in not only getting rid of weapons material, which is certainly the primary objective, but in assuring adequate fuel supply.
On plutonium, right now there is a program that the U.S. and Russia have agreed to to look at disposing of surplus weapons plutonium. And Duke Energy----
Mr. Issa. That is the MOx program?
Mr. Fertel. That is the MOx program.
Mr. Issa. That is disposal, not power generation.
Mr. Fertel. Well, it is power generation. MOx is mixed oxide fuel, which is mixing plutonium and uranium to make the fuel so that I use it in a reactor as fuel. The French use MOx fuel right now; the Japanese are moving to use MOx fuel. And what we are doing is have a deal with the Russians to get rid of weapons plutonium.
And actually, I think the last 2 weeks, what we call lead test assemblies--which are fuel assemblies with a new fuel that you haven't tried so you want to put it in a reactor and you want to test its performance before you actually load a full core in the reactor--arrived at Duke's Catawba plant, and they are going to be testing the lead test assemblies, and if all goes right, they would be licensing the facility to be able to ``use MOx fuel,'' which would be getting rid of plutonium that the Russians have.
I think the bottom line, Mr. Chairman, is anything our country can do to help get weapons material made more benign and then put into reactors so you are actually getting rid of it is probably a very, very good thing for not only our Nation, but for the world, because it is getting rid of stuff that is not good stuff to have around. And the more we can push it, the more better off we would be.
The uranium is probably a bigger problem, to be honest with you, than the plutonium, because there is more high-enriched uranium around than there is plutonium.
Mr. Issa. And more all the time being enriched, apparently, over there.
Any other comments on that round of questions?
[No response.]
Mr. Issa. The President, by talking about nuclear yesterday--and, as you said, repeatedly since the State of the Union--is touching on an issue in which there may not be a majority opposed to it, but the minority, including some of your old colleagues, Dr. Moore, are pretty active.
Where do you think public opinion is on new nuclear power plants? I have already stated the result of a professionally done poll, but obviously only in a district that is familiar with nuclear. Where do you think public opinion is and will education, properly done--and I don't mean propaganda, I mean fair education--would it be helpful to move that to a point in which nuclear power would be more doable?
And, actually, I would like to start with Dr. Moore, because you obviously know enough about nuclear to have very strong opinions on it.
Mr. Moore. Yes. And I don't think you can count on certain of the environmental groups changing their minds on the subject. It is a winner for them, for one thing, and it is along the lines of many of the campaigns these days are unfortunately basically just scare campaigns, and this is one that fits very neatly into that category of just making people afraid, whether it is a Frankenstein foods or PCBs in their salmon or pesticides in their fruit, or all the other things where there actually isn't much of a basis to the concern, but it works to make people afraid. So I think you will see the campaigns against nuclear energy continue.
But I think the key thing is the placement of the reactors. If they are placed in existing nuclear facilities, I don't think you are going to see sufficient opposition to stop it from going forward, providing everything else is in place to make it go forward. I don't think it will be stopped by public opinion. If you try and put in a greenfield nuclear facility, that might be a different case, because there is a whole new NIMBY comes into it then.
Mr. Fertel. I agree with Patrick on it certainly being easier at existing sites. I had mentioned two-thirds of the plants have either gotten license renewal or filed for it, and the license renewal process involved public hearings at the site; and the opposition around sites is really very low. There is opposition at some sites, and you could probably figure out where that might be, but most sites you get very strong support because the people that work at the plant live in the area, they have lived there for years, they know everybody and they have developed credibility; and also the political environment around there has gotten to know the plant.
Mr. Chairman, I have with me--just the stuff I had brought--a February 2005 perspective on public opinion which I would----
Mr. Issa. We appreciate it. We will include it in the record.
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Mr. Fertel. It supports basically--I had not heard the San Onofree number that you mentioned, but we have been doing polling for a long time, and we ask the same questions, so you can either decide you like our question or you don't like our question, but we don't gain the question each time we ask it, so you sort of do get some trend. We have asked the question on ``Do you agree or disagree we should definitely build more nuclear power plants?'' going back a long way, and just to show the public does change its mind, back in the 1998-1999 timeframe, basically 49 percent said no and 47 percent said yes.
When you are out in sort of the timeframe of the end of last year, what you are getting is 60 percent say yes and 34 percent say no. You see a big switch. And that is because energy was on their screen for a while. Blackouts get people's attention; high prices for gasoline get their attention.
Or else, to be honest, I think we, as Americans, take energy for granted. When we have done focus groups when energy isn't on the screen and you ask where electricity comes from, the two most dominant answers are the switch and the outlet. So if I wanted more energy, I used to have a slide that showed more switches and outlets, and that is how you got it. Now, if you probe a little, you do get answers, but the initial answer is that.
Mr. Issa. My son once said if you want money, you can either earn it or go to the bank.
Mr. Fertel. That was better than go to dad.
Mr. Issa. I am trying to keep it that way.
Mr. Fertel. The other question--I think it goes to what Patrick said on NIMBY--is since I think about 2000 we have been asking a question which says ``Given there was a need for more electricity, would it be acceptable or unacceptable to you to build a new nuclear power plant at a site where one exists?'' And what we find on that is that you are in the 60's to 70 percent acceptable, because you have kind of dealt with NIMBY. If I don't have a plant near me, I can say yes, you should build it because it is not going to be near me, and if I do have a plant near me, I am probably understanding of the value of it.
And I think Americans are pretty responsible when they understand a need. I think in the abstract we are maybe not as responsible. But I would put this in: I think, counterintuitive to what people think, there is a lot more support for nuclear than is generally recognized.
Mr. Issa. Excellent. I will mention that the nuclear power plant does a whole lot better than existing or future airports in my district. For some reason, everyone does believe they can go somewhere else for an airport.
I want to close with just a question that I think tees up the question of do we need more nuclear or not. I was born and raised in Ohio. Natural gas is the fuel of choice in Ohio for heating our homes, as it is in much of the--well, not the northeast, but the lands of the western reserve tend to be gas heavy. Ground source heat pumps are very uncommon in that area. Electric heat pumps are also considered to be losers, because electricity historically costs more than just burning natural gas, even if it is in 17 percent efficient furnaces.
If natural gas continues to go up in price, then it is obvious. But if we just take sort of the base today, if we achieve 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour, high efficiency heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, which always tend to be augmented with some electricity consumption, does it represent a viable alternative to home heating with natural gas or other fossil fuels?
Because we are looking today at a load based on the status quo, which is Ohio heating with natural gas and using electricity for lights and air conditioning. If we are looking at dramatically reducing our dependence on fossil fuel other than on mobile vehicles, which we don't have a great answer for today, the next greatest use obviously is the home. In various heating systems it varies from area.
So I will start with Mr. Jones, if you have an answer, and I will finish up with Dr. Moore.
Mr. Jones. I don't have an answer on natural gas versus heat pumps.
Mr. Issa. Marvin.
Mr. Fertel. I think that to think about answering your question you have to think globally. I mean, one of the things that we are seeing happening is China and India driving the price for a lot of things right now--oil, for instance; even we are concerned about nuclear fuel. As China builds a big program, they are going to tie up a lot of nuclear fuel.
And I think as the developing nations begin to use more gas, as Japan uses more gas--it is all going to be LNG because they don't have any domestic supplies--I think what it is going to do is drive up the price of gas, as the rest of the world does their thing. And as you drive up the price for gas, what we are going to find is you need to go--I mean, electricity and gas have always had this love/hate relationship on home heating, and I think that it will probably begin to favor electricity as the gas prices go up per use worldwide. So that would be my guess.
Mr. Issa. And, Dr. Moore, I must admit I teed this up for you primarily because it is a question of sustainability.
Mr. Moore. Well, one way of putting it is it doesn't make much sense to have a 1,200 degree Fahrenheit flame in your basement to heat your house up to 72 degrees Fahrenheit.
Mr. Issa. Touche.
Mr. Moore. In other words, we are using a very high form of energy for what can be accomplished with low-grade energy, and the energy that is in the surface of the earth around and under your home is a low-grade energy which is there because 50 percent of the sun's energy is absorbed by the earth, and it is sitting there waiting to be used; and there is 50 times as much energy under your house than you are ever going to need to heat, cool, and provide all your domestic hot water.
So my friend David Hatherton, president of Next Energy Solutions in Ontario, is the largest distributor of ground source heat pumps in Canada. He also built with his partner the Fort Wayne Water Furnace International plant. And I have been working with Dave for over 12 years on this subject now. There is no doubt now that as gas prices are going up, more and more people are choosing to put ground source heat pumps in their homes. His business is growing an average of 50 percent a year right now, and that is reflected across the board. So high gas prices are good for ground source heat pumps.
One of the reasons ground source heat pump sales have been centered in rural areas, and why the rural electrical co-ops have been very much involved with ground source heat pumps, is because often there is no natural gas in these rural areas and people are using propane and oil. And when you compare ground source with propane and oil, there is just no comparison; the ground source is more cost-effective. Compared with gas--until now at least, as gas prices go up and up--ground source has had a hard argument because the payback is so much longer, even 10 or 12 years, and the average homeowner won't go for something like that.
Now, in my estimation, this is purely an issue of human psychology and nothing to do with real economics, because you do get a payback with ground source; it does reduce your energy cost tremendously, because you are getting most of your energy now more or less for free out of the ground, and all you have to do is buy the electricity that you need to pump that energy into your house.
For example, many of us will willingly pay $10,000 or $20,000 more for an automobile than we really need to in order to get all of the functions of an automobile, if we want a BMW, for example, instead of buying a Chevrolet. That happens all across the country everyday; hundreds of thousands of people making that decision, when there is absolutely no practical necessity for it, it is all psychological. People will pay $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 for a home entertainment system when an i-pod hooked up to a micro-stereo would do just fine.
Mr. Issa. Especially for those of us with older hearing.
Mr. Moore. Right. But it is hard to get people to make the decision to invest an extra $10,000 in their home heating, cooling, and hot water supply, even though that allows them to say I have a CO
Mr. Issa. Well, thank you.
I will close by going on the record and saying that I have both a Lexus and a Toyota Prius. I want to appeal to both voters any chance I can.
Mr. Moore. That is very political.
Mr. Issa. Actually, I really love the Prius, it is the ideal car for here in Washington, DC. All kidding aside, it is the statement--and, Patrick, you alluded to this all throughout. We have to use all these sustainable alternatives, nuclear being the subject du jour, but no question at all that we can't give up on any of these.
I look forward to having you back, if you will come back as we progress through this process.
And with that, with unanimous consent, we are adjourned.
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