Background
On January 25, 2011, during his State of the Union
Address to the nation, President Barack Obama stated:
I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: By
2035, 80 percent of America’s electricity will come
from clean energy sources. Some folks want wind and
solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas.
To meet this goal, we will need them all – and I urge
Democrats and Republicans to work together to make
it happen (Obama 2011a).To help meet this goal, the administration is pro-
posing a Federal Clean Energy Standard (CES) for
electricity, which is generally described in the Eco-
nomic Report of the President transmitted to Congress
in February 2011 (Obama 2011b). This CES would re-
quire the nation’s electric power utilities to generate
an increasing share of electricity from clean energy
sources. The CES is a portion of a broader Blueprint
for a Secure Energy Future (Obama 2011c). On March
30, 2011, the President announced the release of this
Blueprint, which “outlines a comprehensive national
energy policy, one that we’ve been pursuing since the
day I took office” (Obama 2011d). Two tenets of the
plan are cutting the nation’s oil dependence by a third
by 2025, and generating 80 percent of the nation’s
electricity from a diverse set of clean energy sources
by 2035 (Obama 2011d). Nuclear energy can directly
contribute to the latter, and by way of electric ve-
hicles and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, indirectly
contribute to the former. As indicated by the degree
of Presidential attention, the significance of energy
to U.S. economic prosperity and national security is
widely accepted. Less accepted is the path that the na-