Pete Domenici: “I wish to make two more observations while my friend from Alabama is still here, and one in a general way. I say to…”

“I wish to make two more observations while my friend from Alabama is still here, and one in a general way. I say to Senator Sessions that we spoke a little bit about the Energy Policy Act which we passed last August. It is a phenomenal bill. People stopped paying attention to it. But in the proposals the President put forth, all but one of those were in the Energy bill. They are waiting to be funded. He proposed them, so we are going to fund them. But from that day that it was passed until today--on the day it was passed, there were zero applications, permit applications for nuclear powerplants. Zero. Today, there are 18. It is not in China that they want to build 20, or something like that; it is in the U.S.A. because of that bill. I am not saying all of them are going to be built, I am not saying they have turned a shovel, but clearly the strong indication from consortia and individual companies is that because of what we did in that bill, it is time to add to the diversity. What does that mean? That means had we had those, we wouldn't have a natural gas shortage today because little of the gas would have gone into powerplants and would have been available for what we are arguing about today. We would have been able to tell Florida, although we don't think it is the case, You will never have to drill there, but that didn't happen.…”