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Federal Policies Needed to Support Nuclear Energy’s Expansion

A major expansion of nuclear energy generation requires federal policy in a number of areas, including:

• new plant financing, principally through creation of a Clean Energy Deployment Administration that would function as a permanent financing platform

• tax incentives for nuclear energy manufacturing and production facilities and work force development

• ensuring effective achievement of the efficiencies in the new-plant licensing process that was established in 1992, but is only now being tested

• management of used nuclear fuel, including limited financial incentives for the development of voluntary interim storage facilities for used uranium fuel and research and development on recycling technology

• nuclear fuel supply, to enhance the certainty and transparency associated with the disposition of government inventories on uranium markets

• other areas, such as creation of a National Nuclear Energy Council to advise the secretary of energy and authorization of a federal program to advance development and deployment of small modular reactors within the next 15 years.

NEI has developed proposed legislation to address these issues. Details on NEI’s 2009 policy initiative are available at http://www.nei.org/resourcesandstats/documentlibrary/newplants/policybrief/2009-nuclear-policy-initiative.

Increasing America’s reliance on nuclear energy will serve other national imperatives besides production of carbon-free electricity. Construction of new nuclear power plants will create tens of thousand of jobs—to build the plants themselves and to produce the components and materials that go into the plants. A nuclear construction program also will breathe new life into the U.S. manufacturing sector, as it rebuilds and retools to produce the pumps, valves, vessels and other nuclear-grade equipment needed for new nuclear plants.

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