Nuclear Energy Insight
Summer 2012—Unlike some issues that polarize presidential candidates, the broad energy positions of President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney are strikingly similar. It’s the finer brush strokes of policy that reveal differences.
Republicans and Democrats alike support an “all-of-the-above” energy production approach and both Obama and Romney support the use of nuclear energy and the development of new reactors.
Obama’s 2011 blueprint for a Secure Energy Future calls for 80 percent of electricity to be generated from low-carbon fuels by 2035. The administration’s clean energy standard includes nuclear energy, which does not emit greenhouse gases as it generates electricity. It also includes wind energy, solar power, natural gas and coal with carbon capture and sequestration.
“We need a sustained all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy—oil, gas, wind, solar, nuclear, biofuels and more,” Obama said in February.
The Obama administration, in support of what it calls “prudent deployment of nuclear energy through loan guarantees,” has conditionally committed to use federal guarantees to reduce the cost of financing two Georgia reactors. That action alone would translate to millions of dollars in consumer savings.
Romney also wants to spur nuclear power plant development. His 2011 energy plan calls for reform of the “cumbersome and restrictive” U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Romney wants the agency to review several new reactor designs and ensure that licensing decisions based on pre-approved designs are issued within two years.
Romney in 2011 said he prefers streamlining the federal permitting process for the use of loan guarantees through the Department of Energy. If permits are not issued for approved sites and designs within a specified time period, the government should “refund the money to [nuclear energy utilities] that have invested to build the facility.”
The candidates also have similar approaches for managing used fuel from America’s nuclear energy facilities.
After Obama vowed during the 2008 presidential campaign to abandon the technical review for the Yucca Mountain used fuel repository in Nevada, the administration halted NRC review of the project’s safety permit.
The administration then convened the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to explore approaches for used fuel management, including a recommendation to begin a consent-based approach to develop consolidated storage facilities.
Romney too focused on the politics of Yucca Mountain, expressing support for the consent-based storage alternative recommended by the commission. “The people of Nevada ought to have the final say [on Yucca Mountain],” Romney said at a Las Vegas debate in October.
“If Nevada says, ‘Look, we don’t want it,’” Romney continued, “then let other states make bids and say, ‘Hey, look, we will take [it]. Here is a geological site that we have evaluated, here is the compensation we want for taking it.’”
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