I commend the leadership of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the College of William and Mary, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory for organizing this conference on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Atoms for Peace.

President Eisenhower demonstrated remarkable vision in presenting his remarks to the United Nations 50 years ago. At that time the framework of the challenge confronting the world with nuclear technologies was only dimly visible. But with that speech, he launched this nation and the world on a quest to harness the atom solely for purposes of peace—a quest that remains unmet today.
 
At the time of his speech, our nation had conducted 42 test explosions and used two weapons to end the catastrophic Second World War. The Soviet Union had demonstrated their nuclear weapons capability. But the dimensions of the Cold War, which President Eisenhower hoped to avoid, were only vaguely defined. Nevertheless, his words ring true today:

"Let no one think that the expenditure of vast sums for weapons and systems of defense can guarantee absolutely safety for the cities and the citizens of any nation. The awful arithmetic of the atomic bomb does not permit of such an easy solution."

The President further noted that the ability of the U.S. to lay waste to an aggressor would be a hollow victory indeed–hardly befitting the founding principles and ideals of this nation. He noted that such reasoning would be:

"to accept helplessly the probability of civilization destroyed–the annihilation of the irreplaceable heritage of mankind handed down to us generation from generation–and the condemnation of mankind to begin all over again the age old struggle upward from savagery toward decency and right and justice."
 
In some ways, we have come a long ways from Ike's words. But in other ways, we still have a long ways to go.

Frustration over our slow progress forty-four years after the Atoms for Peace Speech led me to speak at Harvard in 1997 and issue a challenge to the nation's leaders to work toward realizing the promise of nuclear technologies to benefit all of mankind.

Indeed, much of my energies over the last decade have been devoted to realizing more of the vision of Atoms for Peace, from both the military and civilian perspectives. I have frequently noted that the citizens of the world will fully realize the benefits of the atom only when the nations of the world have fully controlled and mitigated the military threats of these technologies.

I have championed many initiatives on the military side of this equation, from Cooperative Threat reduction, to the Material Protection Control and Accounting Program, the HEU deal and the Plutonium Disposition Program.

We have seen good progress in some of these initiatives. Certainly the Nunn-Lugar program has accomplished a great deal. Significant quantities of fissile materials are under better control today. There is less HEU in Russia's stockpile. Plans to further reduce the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are positive.

But we still face immense challenges:

• My longstanding and serious concerns for vastly improved controls over, and reductions in, tactical nuclear weapons remain unresolved.
• The amounts of Russian fissile materials not under adequate control are far too large.
• Promising programs for conversion of Russian weapons scientists to commercial endeavors have been complicated by limited access to the closed cities.
• Far too many radioactive sources are poorly controlled and present significant risks for use in so-called dirty bombs by terrorist groups.
• Too many reactors around the world remain fueled with weapons-grade uranium, and,
• Too many of our programs focus solely on the Russian Federation, instead of recognizing that we should be working as co-leaders with the Russians in a global partnership for nonproliferation programs that encompasses all willing nations.

And of greatest personal disappointment, the absolutely vital plutonium disposition program remains stalled with wrangling over the legal issue of liability indemnification. Frankly, I can only say "Shame on both our nations" when we allow an issue like liability indemnification to stop progress towards disposition of weapons grade plutonium. Where are our priorities? This program is not just in U.S. interests. It is not just in Russian interests. It is a concrete step toward a safer world. It is incredibly frustrating to watch the endless negotiations on this point while we forget the importance of the underlying program. This begs for leadership from the governments of both our great nations.

In this past year, I became Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In that role, I have invested immense time in crafting a national energy policy. As a nation, we face an immense challenge in meeting our growing energy needs while preserving the environment that we cherish. 

In the course of this challenge, I have noted how simple my task would be if I only needed to satisfy one region of our nation. But the challenge is not that simple, we need a policy that meets the needs of the entire country–it cannot be done in a piecemeal fashion.

We are poised now to succeed with this new energy policy. After a strong vote in the U.S. House of Representatives, we await a favorable vote in the U.S. Senate. With that vote, the nation will have a comprehensive approach to our diverse needs–an approach that balances conservation, improved efficiencies, and new production.

Achieving increased production, while meeting our environmental mandates, is far from simple. There's no simple or single silver bullet that will solve this dilemma. We must harness all the clean energy sources we have to meet our citizens' needs. Nuclear energy must be a part of that equation.

No other energy source offers the clean, reliable, baseload power that we derive from nuclear energy. Yet for many reasons, development of nuclear energy has been on hold in this nation for over one quarter of a century. We either reverse that trend now, or we can buy nuclear energy from willing foreign suppliers in not too many years.

For that reason, a significant part of the comprehensive energy bill is devoted to civilian nuclear power. The true words of President Eisenhower echo over the years to remind us of the importance of nuclear power:

"The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here now-today. Who can doubt...that this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient and economic usage."

In the energy bill, I set out to chart a course over the next decades toward a strong role for nuclear power, both here and around the world, both in developed and in developing nations. I can best summarize my efforts here with discussion of five key goals in the bill.

Of first priority, I had to assure that the liability foundation for our nuclear programs since 1957 remains intact. For that reason, the bill incorporates a 20 year extension of the Price-Anderson statute.

Then I had to reverse that quarter century dearth of new plant construction. We simply must see new domestic plants constructed. It does us little good to compliment ourselves on our foresight in developing and licensing advanced reactor designs B designs which are providing reliable power around the world today–when we have none of these reactor designs here.

Thus my second priority is to break this mold and provide production tax credit incentives for construction of a few modern plants.

With those few plants, we can show the public that nuclear power plants can be built in this country, and that they can be built with economics and safety consistent with the public's demands. With those few plants, we can convince the investment community that new plant construction is a solid investment opportunity, not one to be shunned.

My third and fourth priorities are essentially tied in importance. They are to:

• Re-establish our technology base to meet new needs with new reactors, and
• Develop better waste management solutions.

The bill authorizes a major new R&D reactor program to demonstrate a new generation of ultra-safe, ultra-efficient reactors, which minimize waste production and proliferation concerns. It further demands that the project enable R&D for advanced approaches to both electricity and hydrogen production.

As an aside, let me note that progress toward a hydrogen economy is another major emphasis in the energy bill. The opportunity to convert our transportation system to hydrogen fuel offers immense benefits, but only if we can produce that hydrogen cleanly and economically. As you all know, we ca not mine or drill for hydrogen, we have to produce it. That requires energy. The bill supports alternative production approaches, from solar to nuclear to biological.

In the area of nuclear waste policy, I am convinced that our citizens demand better solutions to nuclear waste than we have today. Now we plan to simply bury and forget about our spent fuel–never mind that it retains an immense store of energy or that its constituents are highly toxic. There are better solutions, and I have championed their study over the last few years. With the energy bill, we authorize expanded programs to develop better strategies for spent fuel management. These strategies will go far beyond Yucca Mountain and will result in better use of, and far less toxicity from, any future repository.

And finally, my fifth priority in the bill is my recognition that we do not have human resources in the pipeline to support an expansion of nuclear energy, much less to appropriately control and mitigate the military challenges of the nuclear genie.

We need stronger university programs, with more students challenged and motivated to master these technologies to contribute to the future workforce. For that reason, there are strong educational programs in the bill.

I am confident that we will pass this bill early next year, and use it to work towards fulfillment of more of Ike's vision.

The bill will enable our nation to proceed with development of nuclear power here at home. But my vision, like Ike's, does not stop at our own borders. We must help provide developing nations with the energy resources so that they too can grow and prosper. The seeds of unrest and terrorism will be far less fertile as the standards of living of all peoples are raised towards our own.

As we assist these nations, we should suggest that they focus their attentions on clean energy sources, to avoid the environmental problems that many developed nations like the United States are experiencing with past energy sources. Nuclear should be one of the clean technologies we offer to them.

Now obviously, many of those developing nations do not have the necessary infrastructure to produce and safeguard nuclear materials or to design new reactors. But we can and should help them in specific ways, such as providing small sealed reactors, along with full assurances from the developed nations to guarantee to provide all their life-cycle fuel services. Those same life-cycle fuel services should be offered to many other nations for large reactors as well.
   
We should work through international organizations, like the IAEA that Ike created, to craft global approaches to fuel production and waste handling in ways that minimize proliferation concerns. We just require the will to work through and with the international community to make them a reality.

President Eisenhower offered an immense challenge to the world. And while parts of his vision have been realized, many parts of it remain to fulfill.

Dr. Susan Eisenhower emphasized this view in a recent speech when she noted that: "Atoms for Peace is a vision – not a blue print."

Today we need to redouble our efforts to realize that vision and fill in the details of that blueprint, which Ike summarized so well when he closed his speech with the words that: "the United States pledges before you - and therefore before the world - ... to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life."