Nuclear energy funding for INL may be coming

BOISE – Once touted as a key component of America’s energy future by the Bush administration, a nuclear energy demonstration project proposed for the Idaho National Laboratory has never received a long-term funding commitment to match the rhetoric.

Sen. Larry Craig, who spent most of Wednesday guiding Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman around the eastern Idaho complex, predicts that could change by this summer.

“President Bush doesn’t have cold feet, but he does have the reality of a very tight budget and ‘you fund what you see’ as the most pressing need in the moment,” the Idaho Republican said. “What Congress is saying is that we are going to readjust those priorities because this is a project that is already well-advanced and Idaho is without question the lead laboratory for it.”

Last week, Craig inserted a provision into a long-delayed Senate energy policy bill to begin construction of an experimental nuclear power plant at INL, authorizing $1.25 billion for research and development over the next 10 years.

If the provision remains intact as the energy bill is debated by both the Senate and House this summer, it would be one of the biggest federal public works projects in the country.

The experimental nuclear reactor would produce electricity and also commercial quantities of hydrogen to complement the Bush administration’s focus on that fuel.

The president has predicted Americans will drive cars operated by hydrogen-powered fuel cells in less than two decades.

Craig’s provision passed the Senate Energy Committee unanimously and mirrors a measure adopted last month in a House committee’s version of the comprehensive energy policy bill.

The so-called Next Generation Nuclear Plant initiative has gotten more support from Congress than from the Department of Energy, which Bodman heads.

The DOE did not request any funding for the next-generation program in the new 2006 fiscal year, after spending $14.4 million in fiscal 2004 and $25 million in fiscal 2005.

In a 2004 “Hydrogen Posture Plan,” the Energy Department set a goal of building a demonstration nuclear reactor that also produces hydrogen by 2017.

President Bush issued a call for “safe, clean nuclear energy” in his State of the Union speech in February. But in March, Bodman said the Bush administration was not willing to commit to funding the estimated $2 billion cost of the next-generation program over the next decade.

“Whether it’s $2 billion or not, it’s a sizable amount of money,” Bodman said after he was asked at a congressional hearing about the 2017 target for the next-generation reactor by Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, and other members of the House panel that appropriates funding to the Energy Department.

“I would call into question whether we’re going to make any schedule” for constructing the new reactor, Bodman told the committee.

After showing Bodman preliminary research under way at INL on four potential designs for the new reactor, Craig said Wednesday he believes President Bush and the Energy Department remain committed to the project.

“This president has openly advocated this reactor, but there’s been no authorizing legislation to give us the money because OMB (the Office of Management and Budget) has consistently pushed back on it,” Craig said.

“Now we have been successful in putting authorizing language in the energy bill, and by this summer, I think, that bill will be in place authorizing the new reactor design concept and sitting it here in Idaho.”