Obama would triple nuclear guarantees

President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget almost triples U.S. loan guarantees for nuclear power-plant construction, funds development of a new breed of smaller reactors and spends more on “breakthrough” energy research.
The Energy Department would get $29.5 billion, a 12 percent increase, to support Obama’s proposed “clean-energy standard,” which requires 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from low-pollution sources by 2035, according to the fiscal 2012 budget released last week. The proposed standard is part of Obama’s policy “to ensure strong American leadership in the clean-energy economy,” according to the budget plan.
A program that guarantees as much as $18.5 billion in loans for construction of nuclear reactors would expand by $36 billion in 2012, to backstop $54.5 billion in lending. A program to develop designs for “small modular reactors” would get $67 million. These reactors would be about one-third the size of those now used by U.S. power companies, according to the department.
Obama’s budget, which requires approval by Congress, would also expand loan guarantees for energy-efficiency and renewable energy programs by as much as $2 billion.
The department’s Office of Science, which has funded research into subjects ranging from lithium batteries to the human genome, would get $4.96 billion, compared with $5.20 billion in 2010, the last enacted budget for the agency. The Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which Secretary Steven Chu refers to as a “swing for the fences” program designed to find cutting-edge technologies, would get $550 million, up from $400 million it got through the economic-stimulus law Congress passed in 2009.
Some of the money to pay for the increase comes from a 45 percent cut for the department’s Office of Fossil Energy, to $418 million. The reductions include ending a program that studies how to extract oil and gas from shale, tar sands and other “unconventional sources.” &#8226