Listening in on Al Gore's Testimony

I've been listening to Al Gore's testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning, and he predictably left expanded use of nuclear energy out of his list of options to restrain carbon emissions. As Mitch Singer noted this morning, that's no surprise.

I couldn't help but chuckle a little bit when Gore mentioned Amory Lovins in glowing terms. As my colleague David Bradish has written in the past, while Lovins might have some interesting things to say about conservation, his research in the area of nuclear energy is fatally flawed. Click here for our complete archive on Lovins.

More later, I'm sure.

UPDATE: Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) just mentioned the elephant in the room, namely that electricity demand will be increasing by about 40% in the coming years and that nuclear energy can play a role in providing that energy while helping to keep the air clean. He also mentioned the continued political impasse over Yucca Mountain and the billions of dollars that are piling up in the nuclear waste fund. Waiting on Gore's response.

GORE's RESPONSE: The former Vice President repeated an answer that he's given before: That while he's not an absolutist about nuclear energy and believes that it can play a role, he doesn't believe that it can play any larger a role than it does now because of the cost.

He also said that because nuclear power plants are so large and take so long to build, that utilities will be discouraged from investing in them. But as we've noted here at NEI Nuclear Notes before, nuclear plants in Asia have been built in 42-48 months -- about the same amount of time it will take to build advanced coal-fired plants like ultra-super critical or IGCC plants.

Further, NEI estimates say that the capital cost of nuclear power plants is expected to be competitive with advanced coal-fired power plants. If you factor in capital costs from new nuclear power plants, productions costs and most importantly, the cost of carbon controls on fossil-fueled power plants -- something that Gore vigorously endorsed in his oral testimony -- the cost of electricity from nuclear energy is very competitive when compared to coal and more affordable than electricity from renewables. For more, see our recent Wall Street Presentation.

ANOTHER NUCLEAR QUESTION: This time from Rep. Bob Ingliss (R-S.C.) who relayed the contents of a conversation with Jim Rogers of Duke Energy. It boils down to this: South Carolina, like a lot of other states, needs to build new sources of baseload electricity generation. Rogers has a choice to make: Either build a coal-fired power plant that will spew all sorts of emissions in addition to carbon; or build a nuclear power plant that will help keep the air clean and produce no CO2. The congressman's question: In light of the environmental benefits, shouldn't government do something to support Duke's decision to invest in a nuclear plant that would accrue so many other environmental benefits?

Gore's answer is straight out of the anti-nuke playbook: We need to pass laws to support individuals who want to sell electricity back into the grid -- the old distributed generation canard that N. Nadir debunked just last week over at Daily Kos. Now Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) is challenging Gore on the issue that Mitch Singer raised yesterday -- that his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, omitted any mention of nuclear energy as part ofthe solution.

Again, Gore insists that he's not reflexively anti-nuclear and once again repeats the distributed energy canard. One point that Ingliss made that Gore neglected to address: South Carolina gets 55% of its electricity from nuclear energy, while California gets 55% of its electricity from natural gas. As we've mentioned before, there are both economic and national security implications for following that kind of course.

For more play-by-play, visit Planet Gore.