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Main recommendations The five most important recommendations of the IEER report, Securing the Energy Future of the United States, are: The United States should adopt an energy plan that would set goals for the long-term — a four-decade period. During this period, it must seek to essentially eliminate the most severe vulnerabilities to attack and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about one-half by 2040. A goal of an average efficiency of 100 miles per gallon for new passenger vehicles (including light trucks) should be set for the year 2020. The efficiency goal should be accompanied by safety and emissions goals, so that all three issues can be coherently and simultaneously addressed. The technologies to achieve the mileage goal already exist. A national policy decision should be made to create regional distributed electricity grids in the next three to four decades. In these regional grids, a large proportion of the electricity would come from relatively dispersed generators, where installation of generation systems would be accompanied by efficiency improvements. Regulatory changes should be geared to encourage the achievement of a distributed grid, rather than a centralized national grid of interconnected local and centralized electricity generation. Local and state governments and their regional and national associations should have sufficient authority and funding to oversee these distributed grids and to regulate them for performance using economic, reliability, security, and environmental criteria. Nuclear power should be phased out. In general, the power plants can be decommissioned as they reach the end of their original license lifetimes. Some might need to be retired earlier if they have particular vulnerabilities. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission should undertake a thorough review of reactors and spent fuel pools that may face special vulnerabilities and consider whether such reactors should be shut before their licenses expire. Phasing out nuclear power in a manner compatible with electric grid stability is imperative if nuclear vulnerabilities, especially from spent fuel storage, are to be reduced to a point where the entire installation becomes unattractive as a terrorist target. The U.S. government should commit about $10 billion per year to purchase renewable energy, fuel cells, efficient automobiles, efficient on-site electricity generation, highly efficient heating and air-conditioning technology, and other leading edge technologies that are not fully commercial in order to promote their commercialization. Another $10 billion per year should be given to state and local governments for the same purposes. Direct subsidies for renewables and efficiency should be eliminated for new capacity replaced by this procurement program, which should operate consistently and reliably for at least a decade, and preferably for 20 years. The procurement program should be carried out annually on a performance-based bidding process similar to that used for leasing out tracts for oil and gas drilling. Tax breaks already promised for existing renewable energy and energy efficiency installations can continue. Other recommendations Federal level The United States should set progressively more stringent carbon dioxide emissions limits per unit of electrical power generation. The United States should commit itself to the Kyoto Protocol, the global agreement under which industrial countries pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, by taking the leadership in announcing a long-term goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by forty to fifty percent in the next four decades (without international trading but possibly with some internal trading of credits in the electricity sector). The achievement of intermediate goals would be negotiated with the those who have ratified the treaty. The Kyoto Protocol currently requires only modest reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions, generally less than 10 percent for the most industrialized countries. It will be necessary to reduce such emissions on the order of 50 percent within several decades in order to mitigate the risks of severe catastrophe. Natural gas should be regarded as the key transition fuel to a renewable energy future. Create a national effort on public transportation as an urban utility (much like water, electricity or telephones) so as to ensure that public and multi-modal transportation get a far larger share of federal resources than at present. A diverse system of transport that includes cars, motorized and rail public transport, bicycle lanes and sidewalks would reduce vulnerabilities to terrorism by diversifying the modes by which people could travel in cities. By making public transportation safe, efficient, economical, frequent, and convenient, energy use as well as time for commuting could be greatly reduced with all the attendant social, economic, and environmental benefits. We recommend that a comprehensive study be commissioned on the cost and feasibility of approaching public transport as an essential public utility to be maintained at reasonable cost with a portion of revenues arising from taxation of gasoline or personal vehicles. Such a study should carefully consider the various security vulnerabilities of an automobile-based urban transport system compared to one in which cars, trains, buses, bicycle paths, and sidewalks are in a better balance. Surplus weapons plutonium and all commercial separated plutonium should be immobilized and stored at a large nuclear weapons plant in subsurface silos in order to reduce the consequences of a severe attack. It is essential that an immobilization program (an approach that mixes plutonium with a non-radioactive material and puts the mixture into a ceramic form that is highly resistant to fire and dispersal in the form of fine particle) be re-instituted and implemented with urgency. No new nuclear power plants should be licensed. Plans for use of plutonium as a fuel in nuclear reactors should be abandoned. Spent nuclear fuel from power plants, which contains 95 percent of all radioactivity in nuclear waste, should be packaged in dry casks within a few years of discharge from the reactor, or when it is safe to do so, rather than waiting until the spent fuel pools at reactors are full. Dry storage should be onsite or close to site in subsurface facilities similar to those of the vitrified high level military radioactive waste stored at the Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina. As nuclear power plants are closed, the storage can be consolidated within a state or region at a closed nuclear power plant site. Control of spent fuel should be transferred to the federal government. The present highly unsatisfactory nuclear repository program should be scrapped and replaced by one that will result in a deep geologic disposal program that will better safeguard natural resources and future generations and also be less vulnerable to deliberate or inadvertent human intrusion. (IEER has done extensive work on this subject. See Arjun Makhijani, "Considering the Alternatives," Science for Democratic Action, vol. 7 no. 3 (May 1999). Online at http://www.ieer.org/sdafiles/vol_7/7-3/index.html.) As a precautionary measure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should order the distribution of potassium iodide tablets to public health institutions, such as hospitals, for distribution in case a massive accident or attack on a nuclear power plant results in large iodine-131 releases. A public education campaign about when and how such tablets might be used is an important public health safeguard while nuclear power plants are still in operation. The United States should request the National Academy of Sciences to create a standing committee to evaluate the energy system from the points of view of supply, efficiency, environment, and vulnerabilities, which would report to the government and the public each year. Vigorous federal programs of renewable energy, energy efficiency and fuel cell research and development, as well as energy policy, such as those at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, should be maintained and reinforced. The federal government should continue filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Bush administration is pursuing this important policy. Its impact on security would be greatly increased if stringent mileage standards were adopted. A program of research, development, and demonstration that couples hydrogen fuels to renewable energy sources and to a variety of end uses, including industrial feedstocks and air transportation, should be undertaken as an investment in a long-term sustainable energy system. One near-term focus of such an effort could be to use wind-generated hydrogen to replace industrial and transportation uses of petroleum as fuel in highly polluted areas. State and local level In addition to the institution of their own procurement policies along the lines discussed above for their own facilities such as schools, colleges, state government buildings and vehicles, state and local governments should: Create or maintain state level regulation of electricity systems in order to achieve the overall goals of system reliability, reserve margins, and transmission and distribution capacity. Establish state and locally owned utilities with public oversight and transparency safeguards, with the goal of promoting high efficiency, secure distributed grids, and adequate capacity of the transmission and distribution system to withstand attacks on critical electricity infrastructure without massive prolonged disruption. Institute regulation at the regional reliability council (which correspond to regional grids) to provide the overall framework for achieving secure and reliable transmission and generation on a system-wide basis, including adequate reserve margins and transmission capacity. Local and state governments and their regional and national associations should have adequate oversight and regulatory authority. Institute rules requiring developers to consider on-site generation with best available technology for heating and cooling efficiency and to justify why these technologies should not be used. Put in place requirements for energy audits to be part of the re-sales of residential and commercial buildings with information about best practices during resale and consequences for the new owners of buildings. Enact stringent efficiency standards for appliances, buildings, and vehicles, should the federal government fail to do so. Create task forces on transportation as an urban utility that would analyze the security, environmental, and economic benefits of regarding public transportation as a public utility, especially when connected with efforts on public safety and excellence in schools. The full report, Securing the Energy Future of the United States, is online at http://www.ieer.org/reports/energy/bushtoc.html.