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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Domenici Made Reviving Nuclear Power His Personal Crusade

By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
          Sen. Pete Domenici returned to his Washington, D.C., office late one evening in October 1997 after a meeting with congressional budget leaders.
        For more than two decades in Congress, balancing the federal budget had been Domenici's personal crusade. That night, he saw numbers that made him think the budget monster had finally been tamed.
        "I think the budget is going to be balanced next year," Domenici told his aides. "I've been working on that for 25 years. What am I going to do next?"
        The answer he and his staff came up with that night was nuclear power. Domenici would spearhead a renaissance of nuclear power.
        Just one month later, Domenici strode into the hall at the annual meeting of the American Nuclear Society in Albuquerque to a standing ovation. Nuclear power, he argued, could provide a safe, clean, reliable, domestic source of energy to meet the nation's growing needs.
        "My intention," he said, "is to lead a new dialogue. I intend to provide national leadership to overcome barriers."
        The results can be seen today inside the gleaming Rockville, Md., headquarters of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. There, workers have begun reviewing applications for 26 new U.S. nuclear power plants — the first such applications since 1979.
        Advocates say the applications mark the beginning of a nuclear power expansion in this country. Critics say that may never happen because of the cost of nuclear power and problems with reactor safety and radioactive waste. But both sides agree that, if it there is an American renaissance for nuclear power, Pete Domenici will have played a central role in making it possible.
        And Domenici has no doubt which side of that argument he falls on.
        A call to arms
        Domenici in October 1997 still had a year of work left on the problem of balancing the federal budget, but he was already setting his sights on the next big problem.
        Staff members who were involved describe a frenzy of work as they tried to flesh out a set of policy proposals in time for a hastily arranged speech at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
        Domenici laid out a vision of nuclear power playing a vital role in addressing the problems of climate change and the nation's energy future.
        "When I came to the Senate a quarter of a century ago," Domenici said in the speech, "we debated our dependence on foreign sources of energy. We discussed energy independence, but we largely decided not to talk about nuclear policy options in public."
        It was a provocative statement, and largely correct. To the extent that nuclear power was on the government policy agenda at the time, much of the discussion surrounded the stalled Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada. It had been nearly two decades since anyone had tried to build a nuclear power plant in this country. A combination of fears of the waste problem and high costs scared away investors.
        "Today," Domenici said in the 1997 Harvard speech, "it is extraordinarily difficult to conduct a debate on nuclear issues," he said. "Usually, the only thing produced is nasty political fallout."
        It quickly became known to members of the U.S. nuclear power community simply as "the Harvard speech."
        "That was, quite frankly, a call to arms," recalled Jim Lake, who served as president of the American Nuclear Society in the years following Domenici's speech.
        Surrounded by experts
        To understand Pete Domenici's approach to the making of U.S. nuclear power policy, it is instructive to spend some time with Pete Lyons, a 65-year-old Caltech physicist-turned nuclear weaponeer-turned national nuclear power policy leader.
        Domenici typically presents himself with the aw-shucks demeanor of the former school teacher and small-city lawyer he once was. It is sleight of hand, disguising a penetrating intellect, former staffers say. But, in addition, he has always had a talent for surrounding himself with an extraordinarily smart staff.
        "I acknowledge," he said in an interview, "that they were smarter than me."
        As Domenici's push for a nuclear renaissance took shape, Lyons was at the senator's elbow. A former senior leader of Los Alamos National Laboratory's nuclear weapons program, Lyons was plucked from the weapons program and thrust into a national policy role when Domenici lured him to Washington to work as a Congressional Fellow.
        Lyons, who now serves on the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was there that October night and was part of a frenzy of work that went on in the weeks that followed to flesh out the general outline of a nuclear power policy agenda leading up to the Harvard speech.
        Domenici immediately asked Lyons to arrange briefings with nuclear power experts. It repeated a theme that can be seen through the senator's career, say those who have worked closely with him — a voracious curiosity that drove him to assemble groups of experts to help him understand the issues he was grappling with.
        C. Paul Robinson, the former director of Sandia National Laboratories who once served as a U.S. arms control negotiator, remembers well the experience of getting quizzed by Domenici on a technical subject.
        "Every time you went in, it was like an oral examination for your Ph.D.," Robinson said.
        The style reached far beyond nuclear energy. On an average day, said Alex Flint, another former aide and member of Domenici's in-house nuclear brain trust, "Domenici probably had four or five meetings with experts on different things."
        "I think it's very much a skill that he has," Lyons said in an interview. "It's one that he's cultivated."
        Progress still needed
        To look back on the Harvard speech through the lens of a decade's history is to see in part a vision that has not yet been fulfilled.
        Domenici's call for a new approach to nuclear waste — reprocessing it, extracting usable nuclear material that can be turned back into nuclear fuel, reducing waste in the process — appears as far from reality as it was a decade ago. A Department of Energy effort, instigated by Domenici in the intervening years, has stalled.
        But other measures driven by the New Mexico senator have become law, and underpin the progress being made toward the construction of nuclear power plants.
        New licensing procedures written into law by Domenici eliminated one of the key roadblocks used in the past by reactor opponents to block new plants.
        Legislation in recent years has also offered subsidies and loan guarantees for the first companies willing to risk sticking their necks out to build the first new nuclear power plants, and industry officials say those enticements have been central to their ability to move forward. Domenici also pushed through extension of the federal law that helps provide nuclear power plants with insurance against accidents.
        Critics, like Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a think tank that opposes nuclear power, complain that nuclear power should be made to stand on its own two economic feet, not subsidized by the federal government. Without the subsidies engineered by Domenici, Makhijani argued in a recent interview, nuclear power will go nowhere because it is expensive compared with alternatives.
        "Nuclear power is very likely to be economically obsolete before the first (new) power plant comes on line," Makhijani said.
        Domenici, not surprisingly, disagrees. "Nuclear," he said in a recent interview, "is on its way."