One of the great things about living and working in Washington, D.C., is being in the heart of the action, such as watching President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address from the House gallery. Although I’ve have the good fortune to attend most of President Obama’s joint session speeches, as well as joint sessions under previous administrations, it never gets old.

Observing the pre-speech activities – watching the Members interaction, applauding the First Lady’s entrance, chatting with Members afterward and, of course, the electric moment when the House Sergeant-at-Arms calls out: “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!” and then watching the President enter chamber are all high points of these events.

But beyond the political theatre and pageantry, hearing the President’s message to Congress, in which he lays out the roadmap for his policies in the next year is always the most compelling part.

As a member of the AREVA Community Advisory Council, I am particularly interested in the Administration’s energy policy, so I leaned in when, halfway through his speech, the President turned his attention to this topic. It was very gratifying to hear him not only refer specifically to “America’s energy future,” but to offer up specific proposals to get us there.

The President praised the clean energy industry, saying it has “rarely been more profitable … never been more promising.” He acknowledged that today’s political climate makes it impossible to pass a comprehensive climate change plan, but called on Congress to begin taking steps to create a clean energy standard for innovation.

The President went on to announce a plan to develop clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes and revealed that the Navy would purchase enough capacity to power 250,000 homes a year – one of the largest federal commitments to clean energy in history. He also proposed to help incentivize manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and upgrade their buildings, noting that this will result in a less pollution, more jobs, increased manufacturing and a $100 billion reduction in energy costs over the next decade.

While the President did not specifically mention nuclear energy in his speech, his plan encompasses the energy mix of which nuclear is a key part. And the following day, the White House offered more details of the plan in “A Blueprint to Make the Most of America’s Energy Resources,” which noted that 80% of the nation’s electricity will come from clean sources, including renewable sources, such as nuclear, wind, solar and biomass.

Just as I carefully noted the President’s clean energy plans, I also paid close attention to how the Members of Congress responded to his proposals. Fortunately, I had a perfect seat both to watch the President and to scrutinize the reaction. While much of the reaction to the speech was partisan – with members of the President’s party applauding loudly while members of the opposition remained silent – Members of both parties reacted positively to some of the President’s clean energy proposals.

It was good to hear the President so clearly restate his commitment to clean energy and creating jobs in the clean energy industry. It was also encouraging to see the possibility for a bipartisan approach to clean energy.

This possibility may be a slight one; much will get lost in the noise and smoke of 2012 presidential and congressional politics. But let’s hope that the White House and Congress will rise above partisan politics and work together to ensure that clean energy is an integral part of America’s energy future.

During his speech, the President assured us that “I will not walk away from clean energy.” That’s a promise we should all help him keep.

“Global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning jumped by the largest amount on record last year, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery….Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to an analysis released Sunday by the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists tracking the numbers. Scientists with the group said the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.”

There was some hope before that one of the few positive side effects of the global recession would be a trend of less of these pollutants. But our continuing fossil-fuel-based energy choices – coal, natural gas, etc – pumped a half-billion extra tons of carbon into our skies in 2010. This is not the path for sustainable development or clean energy implementation—achieving those goals requires a substantial increase in clean, reliable, low-carbon nuclear energy.

David Rupert, incoming Alliance Chair and Director, discusses Alliance achievements in 2011. Source: EUISSCA

On a supplier panel moderated by AEP’s Manager of Sustainable Supplier Development, Mark Bueltmann, I presented on AREVA’s using Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodology to reduce environmental impact. Given its inherent focus on eliminating waste and process improvement, the LSS approach easily lends itself to natural resource/energy efficiency projects. For example, one of our LSS energy efficiency projects reduced that site’s energy consumption by nearly ten percent without requiring any major capital investment. Through this project, we defined the main drivers of the site’s energy consumption and then identified and prioritized a series of behavioral and technical solutions. As another example, AREVA already reduced per person paper consumption in the U.S. by 45% since 2005, but is using an LSS project to achieve an additional 10% reduction.

AREVA and our utility customers have a shared commitment to sustainability. Through supply chain sustainability (facilitated by the Alliance) and complementary supplier diversity programs, we systematically ensure that our operations and initiatives reflect an increasingly inclusive and responsible approach to doing business. Our clean, reliable, safe, and affordable energy future depends on this kind of leadership and collaboration.

As a new member of the C2ES Business Environmental Leadership council, AREVA continues its partnership with C2ES in its mission to address climate change and deliver innovative clean energy solutions. As C2ES states on its website,

“Now more than ever, we need committed voices with the expertise to cut through complexity and craft innovative solutions; the independence to separate fact from fiction; and the credibility to work with all sides to build common ground.”

We wholeheartedly agree, and welcome The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions’ ongoing, experienced advocacy and leadership.

The full video is below; Mr. Besnainou’s comments run from 18:59 – 26:32.

Black says the percentage increases are “a logical extension of the twin-track approach that governments in general have had; we want to curb emissions, but we also want to grow.”

These significant jumps clearly describe the real-world environmental impact of fossil fuel sources ramping up to meet increasing demand, while thousands of megawatts of clean energy nuclear power is hobbled by misdirected, ill-informed activism. We’re running back to the future of increasing greenhouse gases by the de facto replacement of nuclear with fossil fuels.

The challenge is in his question: “What has to be done now to ensure emissions fall fast enough that the target of constraining the rise in global average temperatures below 2C from pre-industrial times can be met?” The daunting answer is a global 4.8% per year drop in carbon intensity between now and 2050. Black notes, ”That’s a rate that has hardly ever been achieved, except in the context of the collapse of communism or a major war.”

So what to do?

Black includes another successful example in the first of his three concluding recommendations: “Rapid and widespread adoption of nuclear power (France decarbonised at 4.2% per year during the 1980s through this approach)”

We’ve succeeded before; we can achieve this decrease again. Along with rapid implementation of renewables and energy efficiency, nuclear energy is part of the solution to a robust, low-carbon energy future.

The PwC analysis is here.

The latest writer to notice this posted an article at The New Republic, “How Germany Phased Out Nuclear Power, Only to be Mugged By Reality.”

“Yet in bowing to the country’s strong anti-nuclear movement, Germany appears to have suddenly gone off track: Within the last year the country has gone from a net exporter of energy to a net importer, and the carbon intensity of the energy it purchases has risen as well. Now, with its energy politics in turmoil, Germany is serving as a very different sort of model for environmentalists: how not to go green.”

The article then lists several specific lessons learned from Germany’s energy choices, with one being that ending nuclear energy did not spur more renewable use in Germany thus far:

Indeed, Laszlo Varro, the head of the gas, coal, and power markets division at the International Energy Agency, told me the end of nuclear power ultimately won’t have a discernible impact on renewable generation. That’s because the main obstacle to renewable development isn’t competition from nuclear power, but the challenge of transmission—how to bring electricity from offshore wind farms in northern Germany to the factories in the south. The nuclear phaseout, Varro argues, will only exacerbate this challenge by removing nuclear plants from southern Germany and increasing the north-south energy imbalance.

And since this is the case, by definition, less nuclear power actually results in more dirty fossil fuel use and more greenhouse gas production:

None of this means that Germany has necessarily fallen off course in meeting its ambitious renewable energy targets (the 2050 goal involves many factors, and it’s too soon to judge the ongoing progress with any certainty). But the country’s chances of meeting its emissions goals will almost certainly suffer. That’s because replacing low-emissions nuclear power with wind or solar doesn’t actually reduce emissions—and replacing it with coal and gas only worsens the situation. “Reaching the carbon dioxide emissions target will be more difficult and more expensive after the moratorium,” Varro predicts.

Thus far the effort has also made Germany markedly less energy independent as a nation:

Meanwhile, the biggest financial winner from Germany’s nuclear moratorium, Varro says, is nuclear power outside Germany. Since March, Germany has imported considerably more electricity from neighboring countries like France that rely on nuclear power sources. It’s also turned to power from coal-fired plants in Poland and the Czech Republic.

The author then closes with a long view perspective: Germany may be a gigantic experiment, showing how policy and energy choices impact a large industrial country, and that “the world’s environmentalists have their eyes on Germany. It’s just that the example the country is setting might not be the one he intended.”

Many other experts from around the world are seeing this same thing:

To be sure, as a laboratory for an energy experiment of this magnitude, Germany does have some advantages. It’s a highly industrialized country with a substantial investment in renewable energy sources and a history of beating expectations…. But many energy experts are more skeptical. In a survey this month of experts in 21 countries by the London-based World Energy Council, none of the respondents said they expected Germany to meet all of its stated energy goals, and more than three-quarters predicted a weakening of the Germany economy over the coming decade as a result of the nuclear phaseout. “It’s really a catastrophe,” Kleinknecht told me.

This is a must read article, you can find the whole work here.

Countries around the world marked the world’s population reaching 7 billion Monday with lavish ceremonies for newborn infants symbolizing the milestone and warnings that there may be too many humans for the planet’s resources….While demographers are unsure exactly when the world’s population will reach the 7 billion mark, the U.N. is using Monday to symbolically mark the day. A string of festivities are being held worldwide, with a series of symbolic 7-billionth babies being born.

Dr. Eric Tayag of the Philippines’ Department of Health said later that the birth came with a warning. “Seven billion is a number we should think about deeply,” he said.

We agree. Seven billion people — not to mention the projected growth rates from here — is a sobering statistic. As many commentators are pointing out, this accelerating population brings up important and pressing global health, housing, education, food and environmental questions.

But we also know undergirding and influencing all of these issues are the immediate questions of energy and sustainability.

Our global future requires a considered and balanced approach combining expanded renewable and nuclear energy solutions to provide and maintain steady, reliable, low-carbon power. This need is clear. How we accomplish it requires creative cooperation still hobbled by polarizing activism.

We must focus on these larger and harder questions together. We now have seven billion reasons to do so, and counting.

Here is the full report, but we wanted to highlight some snippets. It highlights the challenge faced by California for it’s 2050 energy needs:

The main focus of the organization’s analysis is on the CCST Realistic Model, which assumes that total electricity demand in California in the year 2050 amounts to 510 terawatt-hours per year…

We specifically like that they see — as we deeply believe — that nuclear power is the ideal compliment to (rather than competitor) to renewable energy solutions.

“Nuclear power is a strong contender for zero-emissions energy because it can provide constant, or ‘baseload,’ power that can complement renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. While clean, many renewable energy sources produce power intermittently: if there’s no sunlight and no wind, there’s no power. However, a constant base output of nuclear power could make it much easier to deal with the highly variable power levels from renewables,” points out chairman Burton Richter. California’s law requires at least 33% of electricity generation be provided with renewable energy.

It’s a detailed and serious paper. It points out many of the challenges (many of them political) as well as the opportunities.

The paper points out that “expansion of nuclear power in California requires growth in public acceptance, which has been eroded by the Fukushima incidents. The question is will relatively low energy costs, nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions, and the need for energy reliability change this position over time?”

Read the entire paper here, and would love to hear in the comments any thoughts you have….