Political Quotes

“about a year ago, the United Arab Emirates decided to secure its energy future. The Emirates is a small Persian Gulf state that is awash in oil and annually rakes in about $80 billion in oil revenues. For its own domestic energy needs, however, it opted to go with another technology--nuclear power. Its reasoning was that the oil in the ground will eventually run out and that it would be best to conserve and prepare for that day. The Emirates specified they wanted to build four nuclear reactors and estimated the costs at around $40 billion. Sure enough, the bids soon started coming in from the world's leading nuclear vendors. There was Areva, the company born out of France's nuclear effort--they now get 80 percent of their electricity from nuclear and are building one of their new Evolutionary Power Reactors in Finland. There was Westinghouse, which is building its new AP1000 reactors in Japan and China. You may recognize the name. They were once, along with General Electric, America's leading electrical manufacturer. Now they are a Japanese company, bought by Toshiba in 2006. While these two giants dueled, a third competitor entered the field. South Korea only started building its own nuclear reactors in 1996. Before that they bought from the U.S. and the Japanese. But then they took an old design from Combustion Engineering, another American company, and fashioned the APR-1400. After building a few for themselves they entered the world market.”