News & Events

Thank you. I look over the audience here, and I think I detect a large question mark hanging in the air, and that is, “what’s Bruce Babbitt doing here?” Has life in the private sector gotten that difficult?

Well, I blame it all on Joe Colvin, because we carry on a little dialogue about lots of things in the style of this town. And over lunch one day I was reminiscing about the past, and explaining to him, I said: “Joe, you remember more than 20 years ago, back in 1979, I got a call from the White House in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident asking me to serve on the Kemeny Commission, for reasons that I still don’t fully understand.” I think some munchkin over at the White House was saying, “We need a governor. This guy has a graduate degree in physics. There we are.”

But I was reminiscing with Joe about all of that and explaining to him that never in my long career in public service had I been heard to utter the standard environmental tirade against nuclear power, and he walked right into the breach and said, “You’re on the program.” And here I am.

What I’d like to do today in my brief time is traverse the environmental issues, as I see them, and then offer a word of political advice about the positioning of the potential revival of nuclear power. I spent nearly a year, really one of the most intense assignments I’ve ever had in public life, with John Kemeny and a variety of others on the Kemeny Commission, in which we rehearsed, and probed, and analyzed, and thought about the accident at Three Mile Island in excruciating detail, visited plant facilities all over the country, looked at TVA facilities, looked at the plutonium and other reactors run by the Department of Energy, looked at the French system, the Japanese system. I came to the following conclusions on the face of that report more than 20 years ago, and I have never stepped aside from them. I think that history has only validated the conclusions that we reached then.