Christine Todd Whitman makes the case for nuclear.

Christine Todd Whitman: I think energy independence is a false goal. We’re never going to be energy independent because oil and energy is fungible. Oil moves around.

But we certainly can become less dependent on foreign oil and oil from countries that don’t like us. That, I think, should be our goal; that’s were we should focus ourselves.

We’re going to need to do more in conservation. We’re going to need to do more in renewable resources.

And we’re going to need to look at the base power that we have today, and we need to do more with things like nuclear energy. That’s an important part. It’s 20% percent of our power today.

If you care about climate change, if you care about air quality, nuclear is the only form of base power that does not emit any of the regulated pollutants while it is producing power.

We’re going to have coal. It’s going to be part of our futures; over 50% of our energy today. We need to make sure it’s low sulfur coal and that it’s burned as cleanly as possible and that we understand what we can do with the CO2 that is emitted.

We’re going to have to have all of these things. There’s no one silver bullet.

Recorded on: September 15, 2008