Chris Wright Threatens to Withdraw from Global Energy Watchdog

 New bipartisan bill aims to clear nuclear’s biggest remaining bottleneck

The United States could still withdraw from the International Energy Agency if the Paris-based watchdog, considered one of the leading sources of global data and forecasts on energy demand, continues to promote and plan for “ridiculous” net-zero scenarios by 2050. That’s what Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said on stage Tuesday at a conference in the French capital. Noting that the IEA was founded in the wake of the oil embargoes that accompanied the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Trump administration wants the organization to refocus on issues of energy security and poverty, Wright said. He cited a recent effort to promote clean cooking fuels for the 2 billion people who still lack regular access to energy — more than 2 million of whom are estimated to die each year from exposure to fumes from igniting wood, crop residue, or dung indoors — as evidence that the IEA was shifting in Washington’s direction. But, Wright said, “We’re definitely not satisfied. We’re not there yet.” Wright described decarbonization policies as “politicians’ dreams about greater control” through driving “up the price of energy so high that the demand for energy” plummets. “To me, that’s inhuman,” Wright said. “It’s immoral. It’s totally unrealistic. It’s not going to happen. And if so much of the data reporting agencies are on these sort of left-wing big government fantasies, that just distorts” the IEA’s mission.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

Wright didn’t, however, just come to Paris to chastise the Europeans. Prompted by a remark from Jean-Luc Palayer, the top U.S. executive of French uranium giant Orano, Wright called the company “fantastic” and praised plans to build new enrichment facilities and bring nuclear fuel reprocessing to America. While the French, Russians, and Japanese have long recycled spent nuclear waste into fresh fuel, the U.S. briefly but “foolishly” banned commercial reprocessing in the 1970s, Wright said, and never got an industry going again. As a result, all the spent fuel from the past seven decades of nuclear energy production is sitting on site in swimming pools or dry cask storage. “We want to have a nuclear renaissance. We have got to get serious about this stuff. So we will start reprocessing, likely in partnership with Orano,” Wright said. Designating Yucca Mountain as the first U.S. permanent repository for nuclear waste set the project in Nevada up for failure in the early 2000s, Wright added. “In the United States, we’ve tried to find a permanent repository for waste and we’ve had, I think, the wrong approach,” he noted. The Trump administration, he said, was “doing it differently” by inviting states to submit proposals for federally backed campuses to host nuclear enrichment and waste reprocessing facilities. Still, reprocessing leaves behind a small amount of waste that needs to be buried, so, Wright said, “we’re going to develop multiple long-term repositories.”