News & Events

I appreciate the invitation to participate with you today as you start this important conference. As you well know, the subjects that you are exploring are very high on my list of personal interests. Unfortunately, the pace of actions in the Senate precludes my attendance.

It's been an interesting year for nuclear energy. For that matter, it's been an interesting year to test our national energy policy - or more specifically our absence of a national energy policy. As stark evidence of that fact, we've experienced tremendous swings in prices for oil-based products over the last 18 months, gyrations that underscore our dependence on foreign sources for this precious commodity and for energy resources in general. These events have significantly raised the public's awareness of the importance of stable, predictable baseload sources of low cost electricity, which nuclear energy supplies.

Nuclear energy has risen to the challenge of providing for our nation's energy needs with superb performance. Last year, it produced about 22 percent of our nation's electricity. The average unit capability factor for the nation, the factor that measures the percentage of maximum electricity generation that a plant is capable of supplying, rose to 88.7 percent in 1999. It was 62.7 percent in 1980.

Safety of U.S. plants remains excellent, the number of unplanned automatic shutdowns, or scrams, was zero for the third year in a row. The industry's safety accident rate has dropped from 2.1 lost-time accidents per 200,000 worker-hours in 1980 to 0.34 in 1999—compared to the rate for all of U.S. private industry of 2.9 in 1998. Another impressive statistic is that 96% of the U.S. nuclear power plants were available more than 95 percent of the time.