Brehmer reports that we should expect to hear more from Sen. Lisa Murkowski on her plan to overhaul the nation’s complex energy policy. Alaska’s senior senator said during a July 19 speech to the nonprofit policy study group Commonwealth North in Anchorage that its been 12 years since Congress last did a full-scale update to federal laws covering energy development, security, reliability and innovation. Murkowski has said technology has made many of those policies outdated. She chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “There are things that you’d imagine coming from an Alaskan senator but there’s also a few things that you look at and you say, ‘well, where’d that come from?’” she said in reference to her proposed energy reform legislation.
Both the House and Senate passed versions of an energy reform package Murkowski championed in 2016. However, the bill died when conference committee negotiations stalled. At the time, Murkowski blamed House Republican leaders for opting to leave Washington, D.C. for December holiday parties elsewhere instead of working out minor differences in the detailed legislation.
This go-round Murkowski is particularly highlighting the prospects of advanced nuclear power, which is something she said Alaskans should be very interested in for what it could to in rural communities to lower the cost of energy with zero emissions. “Just imagine a system that’s the size of a cargo container and provides continuous power and needs to be refueled once every 25 to 30 years,”[Fact Check: More likely every 6 to 8 years] she said of potential small-scale nuclear power generation.
On July 16 the Energy and Natural Resources Committee passed the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act with broad bipartisan support. The bill directs the Energy Department to establish advanced nuclear development goals, support nuclear research and work to make low-enriched uranium — nuclear power “fuel” — available for research and demonstration projects. Murkowski has long touted Alaska’s capability to be on the forefront of energy technology development with its high energy costs and ranging climate and geography.
“We are leading as a state when it comes to microgrids and how we’re piecing these smaller energy solutions together,” she said. “We’re getting not only the attention of the nation, but of the world for what we’re doing.”
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