Gov. Otter on Nuclear Power

You know, Idaho has been a whirlwind of questions about energy management. We import all our gasoline, a lot of electricity…we’ve talked endlessly about renewable energy such as wind, solar, ethanol, other forms of bio-fuels, geo-thermal and nuclear energy. Depending on who you listen to there are plans to build a nuclear reactor somewhere in Idaho in the next few years. But we all know, nothing gets done without the Governor’s support. Let’s see how he feels about things.

 “Nuclear power plants sir? I’m all for them. As part of our base load requirements we are going to be very aggressive about wind, about solar, about bio-mass, geothermal…all of the other opportunities that we’ve got in Idaho but we’ve still got to talk about base load. With Idaho importing 40% of our power, our base load needs to be considered. We’ve got the Idaho National Laboratory with all the sophisticated technological and scientific information that they need to utilize nuclear energy and I’m a big advocate of it and so by the way is the new secretary of energy, Secretary Chu and said so. He said it’s the cleanest thing we can do.”