IF YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING “CLIMATE CHANGE” AND YOU DON’T SUPPORT NUCLEAR ENERGY, THEN YOU’RE NOT REALLY WORRIED: Roll Call: Lawmakers, Industry Look to Expand Nuclear Energy Options.

Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, said Thursday he will be leading a review of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s budget to see what changes could be made to allow construction of new reactors.

“We should be re-examining regulation of the nuclear reactor licensing process to make sure it’s not an undue burden,” Alexander said in an address to the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade association. “We don’t want to make it so hard and expensive to build and operate reactors that you can’t do it.”

Daniel Lipman, the institute’s director of policy development, told a House panel in December that in the next five years, federal and state governments should work to fix the financing and regulatory challenges facing advanced reactor designs.

“The time, the uncertainty and the cost required to design, license and build new reactors is daunting,” said Lipman, who spent three decades at Westinghouse and oversaw the commercialization of the AP1000 reactor, a newer type of light water reactor being built in Georgia.

All of the operating commercial reactors in the United States are light water reactors, based on decades of operational experience. Developing advanced nuclear technology with different fuel and cooling features has been an elusive panacea with the promises of intrinsic safety design and reduced nuclear waste.

Alternative designs based on research reactors that have been tested in the United States and elsewhere are touted for their potential to run on waste material piling up across the United States or, in some cases, produce hydrogen as a byproduct to fuel a new era of automobiles.

Faster, please.