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.

The first one was the operational issue, and it was our feeling 20 years ago that with a proper level of institutional attention and discipline, the technology and the operating systems could be operated safely. That was 20 years ago, and I think our conclusions and your efforts in the wake of that accident to sharpen up and tidy up the system vindicated that conclusion.

The second thing I learned in the Kemeny Commission was that technology, as good as it was and is, is not static, and that there were, and are, promising developments on the horizon. During that year, I visited a college campus and learned about TRIGA reactors, which have never been a subject of any contention. Most of the students—and many students in this country—bitterly denouncing the use of nuclear power go to class every day blissfully unconcerned about the nuclear reactor operating in the middle of their campus.

There was a technology invented for these TRIGA reactors, as they’re known, which illustrated the fail-safe principle. And interestingly enough, gradually, on the horizon with the pebble bed technology and other approaches, it’s increasingly clear that the day is coming when the added technological benefit of fail-safe reactor cores will very likely become a reality.

I gave a lot of thought to the waste disposal issues back in those days, but my conclusion then is no different from now, and that is that the waste disposal issue is almost entirely a political issue. It’s a political issue which stems from the inability of many sectors of the public—I understand, I’m not being dismissive—the inability to appreciate the reality of geologic time and to fully comprehend just how extraordinarily stable many land forms are across the, to a geologist, very short time spans that we’re talking about, which, of course, to members of the public seem immeasurably long, but which are, in fact, just a moment in geologic time.

I went away from the Kemeny Commission with one question nagging at the back of my mind, and that was what about the proliferation issue? And that’s an issue that, interestingly enough, I came back to 20 years later, 15 years later, in the Clinton administration. After eight years of dealing on the margins of these issues, I’ve come to the conclusion that the use and control of nuclear power is the key to managing nuclear proliferation worldwide.

It’s an issue that I don’t think has yet reached full flower in terms of public understanding, and in a nutshell it’s this: The nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and with each passing decade it’s perfectly clear that it’s never going to be put back in. Students can go to college libraries and learn how to make bombs; get a couple of good machinists in a physics lab, and pretty soon you’re there.

Now there are two ways to manage a nonproliferation system: One is by blanket prohibition: negative restraints. The other is by providing some incentives by drawing tighter the system of both the negative regulation and the positive control of these materials. It lies behind the replacement reactor proposal in Ukraine. It’s illustrated, most interestingly, by the multinational proposal to provide at least one power reactor in North Korea as a means of bringing that country, with all of its quirkiness and unintelligibility, into the international system. It’s a difficult exercise. It’s not yet complete, but as I’ve watched that, I’ve become absolutely convinced that nuclear power is a positive ingredient in building this web of regulation and restraint.

Then-Vice President Gore did us all a tremendous service in this country by engaging the Russians in the disposition of that huge stockpile of materials that they have, attempting to bring it into an international system, some of which radiated out into the nuclear fuel industry. And I think it’s tremendously important that that effort be funded.

There’s some indication that the administration, I think without careful attention, has kind of stepped back from adequate funding of that program. It’s essential that the industry and our leaders make the case for complete and full funding of that. Because if the proliferation regimes start to unravel, the nuclear power industry will be caught in the undertow of that problem. And so I would, in my first and only mildly political statement of the day, urge you to talk to your friends in the administration and say, “This is absolutely essential for the goals that we share.”

Let me step to the carbon dioxide issue for just a moment. There’s no question that the most appealing environmental issue is the emission-free nature of nuclear power systems. It is an extraordinary asset. It’s an extraordinary selling point. To me, it makes the case for the reemergence of this industry absolutely rock solid.

Now, what’s the problem? As we stand on the threshold, I assume the vice president was over here this morning predicting an early rise of the nuclear phoenix to its full glory. I’m a little more measured, and let me explain why. If I bump up on some political sensibilities, I assure you I’m going to do it in an equal opportunity way, because I believe that the environmental movement and the Bush administration are equally complicit in frustrating the opportunity for the reemergence, the urgent reemergence, of this form of power generation.

You all understand the environmental piece. I need not belabor that. It’s fun to do it, but you’ve already heard it. There is at the core of the environmental opposition to nuclear power a deeply irrational strain that floats out of a half a century—I think it has its roots in the very important initial phobia that came out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it’s very important to understand that. The nuclear phobia that came out of those events has kept us from using those weapons, even as they proliferate, for more than half a century. It’s an extraordinary achievement.

And I think it was inevitable that it would become hard to tease out the strands of rational, productive use and to bring about an environment in which—in a kind of paradoxical way—the use of the peaceful atom, as it was known in those days, finally comes full circle to enhancing the safeguards against nuclear proliferation and the destructive use of nuclear energy. We haven’t done it. We must. Much of the opposition continues irrationally.

Okay. Now I get my licks in at the Bush administration. I hope I’ve convinced you, by taking some ritual blows, not ritual, seriously meant blows to the left, that I now have some standing to explain to you what the problem is on the right and leave you with a question or two in terms of how this might come together.

I think we’re going to reach a complete impasse in the upcoming energy debate in the Congress. The initial problem lies at the feet of the Bush administration. They have thrown down the gauntlet by saying real men love and thrive on fossil fuels. The more the better. We ought to eat coal on our Wheaties in the morning. And that means we’re not going to deal with all of those wimps that are hanging around that table in Europe talking about climate change.

It means that a pledge made in the campaign of a year ago to regulate carbon dioxide is going to be cast aside for two reasons, ostensibly: One, we don’t want to take the economic pain of dealing with the regulation of carbon dioxide and, secondly, we don’t believe it’s a problem anyway.

Now, that position has been taken, but in the face of facts, which are increasingly known to the publicthat climate change is the most important environmental issue facing this planet. The intergovernmental panel has now issued its third report, and the time for questioning is over. This is an oncoming problem of unprecedented magnitude. And by belittling and stepping away from that problem, don’t you see that the administration creates an environment of continued adversary gridlock because the reemergence of nuclear power and its acceptance by the public demands a clear understanding of the dilemma that we’re in. And the fact is that there is no way out of that dilemma, it’s serious, it’s urgent, and we must act now, but we can act now.

I won’t belabor the point, but if you have your staff dig up the Department of Energy studies, the president refers to the DOE studies when he says we can’t do it. The five-laboratory study—and a couple of related studies—have economic modeling that I think is mainstream modeling that says we could put into place a fossil fuels—well, carbon dioxide—emission trading program with a target of a 10 percent reduction by 2010, with no net loss or drag on the economy.

The studies, in their premises, say we can’t do that for the Kyoto targets. I think we need to acknowledge that. The studies are equally clear, because with the Kyoto targets, as you know, by 2010 you’ll be looking at about a 35-percent drop from the business-as-usual baseline, and the economy and the rollover and turnover of capital stock can’t soak that up without a drop in GDP, about a 10 percent reduction. Through emission trading, there’s no discernible effect on the economy.

The reason I wander off into that is because don’t you see there’s a bargain waiting to be made here? And the bargain is simply to turn to the American people and say: “We have an unprecedented threat from the accumulation of carbon dioxide. It’s been demonstrated beyond any additional quarreling. We can handle it. We must handle it. The sooner we handle it, the better. If you don’t like the Kyoto model, if it’s, as I would acknowledge, not realistic, let’s have an American model.

And, fellow citizens, as we address the issue of carbon dioxide, it underlines, in the most crystalline way, the need for an alternative source of currently available, technologically realistic, economically realistic base-load power.

So I think we have, in summary, two courses in the short-term. One is the continuing Kabuki drama, if you will, in which one side is saying, “Nuclear, never,” and the other side is saying, “We want nuclear, but we haven’t told you that it’s really necessary because we’re saying don’t worry about carbon dioxide.”

And the left then comes back and says, “If nobody is worrying about carbon dioxide, let’s just slowly burn in carbon dioxide, rather than taking on yet another complicated, difficult, emotionally complex issue.”

It seems to me that the outcome is perpetual stalemate unless we can talk a lot of sense to both sides and simultaneously introduce a reasonable regulatory regime that uses emission trading and the economic assets at our disposal to begin reducing emissions, and at the same time say the inevitable concomitant and necessary partner in that process is the revival of nuclear.

Thank you.

Q&A Session

QUESTION: Do you believe that if the industry took the initiative, that there are environmental groups that would come work with us to start that dialogue to reach some of these conclusions?

MR. BABBITT: Just to underline my conclusion in response to that question, I don’t think you can lure them out with half of the program. I think you could lure them out in a minute with the kind of consensus that I speak of. Well, not in a minute. It might take an hour. It might take days, weeks. There are groups out there ready to discuss this issue.

There is kind of an orthodoxy in the environmental movement. I dare say it exists in every industry, profit and nonprofit.

There are the members of the group penned in the name of unanimity and hanging together, to stay with the most traditional positions, and those who advocate moving from fixed positions, who are likely to get shot in the back by their fellow utilities or their fellow environmental organizations, as the case may be.

QUESTION: We knew as early as 1969—and I only know this because I stumbled upon a hearing transcript—that nuclear power was frequently identified as one of the mechanisms you could use to avoid things like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, as well as carbon dioxide. So we’re going back 30 years in understanding that this was a very functional tool, if you will, in terms of assimilating environmental and energy goals.

Could you give us some idea about what would motivate the industry to take part in this kind of a program, given that all of the previous activities, in terms of economic incentives to eliminate pollution have not included nuclear in the past?

MR. BABBITT: I think the reason that nuclear has not been brought along with the SO_x and the NO_x , but particularly sulfur and nitrogen, is this: the problems were too easy to solve. They didn’t need your help, and they didn’t need an additional power supply, because what we were basically doing was using technology to ratchet down a problem.

It’s different this time. It is really different this time, because nobody in the real world believes that we can deal with carbon dioxide in a closed system using fossil fuels. It just can’t be done. I mean, you can’t filter out carbon dioxide. You can in theory. I admit you can in theory sequester carbon dioxide, get a chemical reaction with limestone or one of the carbonates, and dump all the stuff. But the orders of magnitude of cost are just out of sight, and I don’t think mainstream economists or scientists tell you that that’s going to change, so you can’t deal with it in a closed system.

You can do some fuel switching, which helps in the middle term. There is an increment, the movement away from coal toward gas, but in the long run it won’t be enough. And that’s what I think brings the environmentalists to the table. You can’t cure it without having the whole spectrum of alternatives out there. When it comes to base power generation, you’ve got three alternatives: fossil fuels; dam up every river to the brim, including the Colorado River to the brink of the Grand Canyon, which ain’t never going to happen; and therefore, you exit with nuclear.

QUESTION: You mentioned earlier that you concluded a while back that the waste problem is a political problem and not a technical one. Were you referring to the permanent repository, or would you include reprocessing as an option that you were speaking of?

MR. BABBITT: Okay. The geologic disposal of nuclear waste is a political problem, period. The studies have gone on for Yucca Mountain. There’s not much left to quarrel about out there. It is a safe, solid geologic repository.

Reprocessing, in my judgment, takes us straight back to the proliferation complex that I covered earlier. I personally think reprocessing makes sense in an ordered proliferation environment where we are eyeball to eyeball with all of the other parties, including the Russians, the Chinese, and others, and in which we can all see a mutual advantage from reprocessing, and have a set of negative safeguards in place. That’s the crucial importance of the Russian process that’s going on now.

QUESTION: Can you actually envision a time when big-name environmental groups, big-name fundraisers and supporters of candidates that are so-called concerned about the environment would actually embrace nuclear power? Can you actually envision that the Sierra Club and some of the far West environmental groups may actually embrace [nuclear power]?

MR. BABBITT: I can see them stepping away from this relentless advocacy fueled by money and emotion. They’re not prepared to, in my judgment, unless there is a bargain of some kind infirst in the public understanding, and usually after the fact in the Congress, in which they can step back, reluctantly covering their retreat with rhetoric all the way, as consideration for getting these other pieces together.