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Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be with you here today. I hope I speak for many of you in this room when I tell you that I am excited. I am excited about the prospects for nuclear power in this country and abroad.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the American nuclear power industry.

How we act to take advantage of this opportunity—more specifically, how the industry players respond to this opportunity—will have enormous consequences for the American energy sector, for our economy, for our national security and indeed for the entire world for generations to come.

That is why President Bush, Secretary Bodman and the rest of us at the Department of Energy are doing everything we can to support and encourage the expansion of safe, emissions-free nuclear power.

That commitment is most recently evidenced by the successful establishment and confirmation of a new assistant secretary for nuclear energy at the Department of Energy—the first time the head of nuclear energy at DOE has held that rank in 14 years.

I don’t think Dennis Spurgeon needs an introduction to this crowd, but if you’ll bear with me for a moment, I’d like to take this opportunity to brag about what I consider to be one of the department’s best acquisitions in years.