Carol L. Berrigan
Director, Industry Infrastructure
Nuclear Energy Institute

U.S. Senate
Committee on Environment and Public Works

Washington, D.C.
September 25, 2007

Madam Chairman, Ranking Member Inhofe and members of the committee, I am Carol Berrigan, director of industry infrastructure at the Nuclear Energy Institute. I appreciate this opportunity to express the industry’s views on the potential for global warming initiatives to produce green jobs.

Let me begin by thanking the members of this committee for their long-standing oversight of the U.S. nuclear industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The 104 reactors operating in the United States today are among the safest and most secure industrial facilities in the United States, in part due to the oversight of this committee for which the committee is to be commended. In addition, they are the nation’s lowest cost producer of baseload electricity, averaging just 1.72 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Those 104 nuclear power plants produce one-fifth of America’s electricity, and U.S. utilities are preparing to build advanced-design nuclear power plants to meet our nation’s growing electricity demand.

Today, nuclear energy represents over 70 percent of the nation’s emission-free generation portfolio, avoiding 3.12 million short tons of sulfur dioxide, .99 million short tons of nitrogen oxide and 681 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, compared to the fossil fuels that would have been burned in the absence of nuclear energy.

On a life-cycle basis, all energy-generation technologies emit some amount of CO₂ during the manufacture of components (whether it be pressure vessels, wind turbines or photovoltaic cells) and other activities not directly associated with the production of electricity at the power plant. A number of studies by organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have concluded that nuclear energy’s emissions “footprint” is comparable to renewables.

+ MORE