Bush visits Limerick, continues promoting nuclear expansion

Bush visits Limerick, continues promoting nuclear expansion

Washington (Platts)--5Jun2006

President George W. Bush visited Exelon Nuclear's two-unit Limerick station
May 24 and in a speech to plant employees continued pushing nuclear power as
"a really important way to meet our goals" of "abundant, affordable, clean,
and safe sources of energy."

"For the sake of economic security and national security," and "to maintain
our economic leadership," the US "must aggressively move forward with the
construction of nuclear power plants," Bush said. "Once you get the plant up
and running, the operating costs of these [nuclear] plants are significantly
lower than other forms of electricity plants, which means the energy is
affordable," Bush said.

Bush said nuclear power is safe "because of advances in science and
engineering and plant design," and "because the workers and managers of our
nuclear power plants are incredibly skilled people who know what they're
doing."

Bush described nuclear power as "an overregulated industry," a situation which
makes investment in new plants "highly risky, because of the regulations to
try to build a plant. People don't know this, but you get yourself a design
for a nuclear power plant, you start spending money for plans and engineering
plants and everything, you get building, and all of sudden, somebody can shut
you down. And that makes it awfully difficult to take risk if a lawsuit can
cause you to spend enormous sums of money and have no productive use of the
money spent."

Provisions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act are designed to reduce that risk,
Bush said. Loan guarantees "give investors confidence that this government is
committed to the construction of nuclear power plants," he said. Production
tax credits "will reward investments in the latest advanced nuclear power
generation," and federal risk insurance "helps protect builders of the [first
six new nuclear power] plants against lawsuits, or bureaucratic obstacles and
other delays beyond their control," he said.

Bush said, "We've got to do something about" the issue of nuclear waste. He
said he is "a believer that Yucca Mountain is a scientifically sound place to
send the waste, and I would hope the United States Congress would recognize
that as well."

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership to develop advanced spent fuel
reprocessing and recycling technologies "will reduce the amount of the
toxicity of the fuel and reduce the amount we have to store," Bush said. GNEP
is "a smart way to combine with other [nations] to reduce storage requirements
for nuclear waste by up to 90 percent," he said.

After his speech at the plant in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, he spoke at a dinner
for the Pennsylvania Congressional Victory Committee fundraiser for Republican
candidates.

Bush's speech is on the White House web site at
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060524-5.html.

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