Jerry Brown: “I have lived through and been actively involved in the development of the civilian power reactor program ever since it…”

“I have lived through and been actively involved in the development of the civilian power reactor program ever since it began 20-odd years ago. I have seen it grow with unrealistic hopes that it represented the solution to all of the world's energy problems and seen those hopes dashed as we found that there were problems with nuclear industry and with the development of nuclear power plants. As a result of our failures to anticipate these problems, we placed a very large burden on the U.S. nuclear industry, and no new plants have been built in recent years and no new plants are on order. What was the reason for that? The reason basically was that we overinvested in plants that had the diverse designs that were subject to different and changing safety regulations, and many energy companies went broke as a result of this. It became clear that we needed to remedy that situation.”