PURELY POLITICAL Governor

He served as senator from and governor of the state of Virginia; turns out George Allen, with his sharp mind and crisp intellect would have made a damned fine president too.

(What follows are edited transcripts of a lengthy conversation conducted with George Allen, the former governor of Virginia (1994-1998) who now serves as Chairman of the Reagan Ranch Board of Governors and Reagan Ranch Presidential Scholar. Governor Allen also served as U.S. Senator from Virginia (2001-2007) and served with then-Senator Joe Biden. We thought it useful to record his evaluation of President Biden then and now, as well as his thoughts on energy – nuclear energy in particular – and a host of other pertinent subjects, including his impression of President Donald Trump, which will be covered in the next instalment.)

Q. You worked with Joe Biden, so you must know something about him that maybe we don't know, or if you've got an impression that's different from what we hear. In other words, what was he like?

A. We were both in the Russell Senate office, somewhat across the hall from each other, and we were on the Foreign Relations Committee [at the same time]. Of course, I was a rookie, and he was chairman and/or ranking member. One of the things that I remember of him was what John Kyle, the senator from Arizona, told me: “You'll waste more time in the Senate by being on time than anything else,” he said. “So if you go to a committee meeting and you’re on time, bring paperwork, letters to sign, decision briefs, and so forth.” Joe Biden, as chairman, would take up the first half hour just talking about whatever was on his mind, so you could stay in your office and watch it on TV, no reason to be there on time.

Joe Biden was, in those days, and I'm not saying he's not anymore, but he was a likable person. He was a Democrat, but left of center, not far left, not like John Kerry, let's say who would be far left, or Barbara Boxer, who was far left. In the Senate, you end up with all sorts of things you have to do on a bipartisan basis and so forth, and Biden would try to work things out. I went to [former South Carolina segregationist Senator] StromThurmond's funeral in South Carolina, and Joe Biden spoke at it. And so [what we saw when he became president] is a different Joe Biden.

The biggest disappointment for me with Joe Biden is he was talking about being a left of center president, but he governed as a Bernie Sanders Socialist. On Day One, he stops the Keystone XL Pipeline. This is getting oil from our friends in Alberta, Canada into the U.S., which is the safest way to transport it. And I'm not against rail or barges, but pipelines are the safest way. Well, if we stop the pipeline, that'll just make it more costly. And of course, that reverberates to all of us who have to pay higher prices.

Do you think there was an ulterior motive for shutting down the pipeline?

Sure. I call it the climate apocalypse cult. The weather and climate on this planet has changed throughout history. And so, let's assume, let’s just stipulate that, all right, maybe it's getting warmer. Let's say it is getting warmer. The question is, what infinitesimal amount of this is caused by humans, as opposed to natural changes? And, if so, what are the solutions?

If you want emission-free electricity, nuclear is emission-free and it's reliable for base load. To rely on energy sources that depend on the weather – whether it's solar or, even worse, wind… I'm not against solar, solar is fine as a supplement. You can put it on rooftops. You can put it on fields where you're not grazing any cattle or growing crops on, and so forth. But that only works twenty percent of the time. We can't have any sags, surges, blips, or interruptions in electricity, and so there may be battery storage, and someday that'll get better.

I think Nanotechnology can help with lighter, stronger materials that need less propulsion and so forth, but you need reliable, affordable electricity, and that's going to come from steady sources. If you can get hydroelectric where you can dam up the Colorado River or the Columbia, Snake, or the Tennessee River, that's fine, but that’s not going to work everywhere.

Geothermal – if you have that – can be affordable, but that's, again, that's a geological question. So, for places where you don't have the terrain of geology, the most affordable, reliable electricity comes from either natural gas – thanks to the fracking revolution of shale –, coal, clean coal, and then nuclear, which does cost more.

I didn't get into it during my speech at the Reagan Ranch Center, because it's blasphemous, but we can learn from the French in nuclear. We just came back from France, but what they do is they reprocess – recycle – the spent fuel. And ultimately, instead of producing radioactive waste that lasts fourteen hundred years, it may be a hundred forty years. The French vitrify [the waste]. They encase it in glass. The French are the leaders in nuclear, and we can learn from them; the small modular reactors they use can be a solution.

For example, if you had tied up the aircraft carrier – USS Ronald Reagan – that I landed on, its nuclear reactor can provide electricity to 40,000 homes. If you put a bank of those, a dozen of them together, this gives you an idea of small modular reactors, as opposed to the big, very, I mean, billions-of-dollars-of-capital-investment big.

How much space do those little modular things take up? What kind of space do you need?

It may be the size of this room, really, but if, well, you'd have to look at what it is; it's more than a [shipping] container but smaller than this [Reagan Ranch Center] building. I don't know the answer. I don't want to say yeah, the ones I've seen, because no one's really using them yet.

There are some experiments going on in the world, but the concept or the engineering design you can take from – extrapolate from – a nuclear carrier or nuclear submarine. Submarine reactors are much smaller because they're nowhere near the size of an aircraft carrier, but the technology, the engineering, the capability of doing it safely is there. And the way you save money on the small modular reactors is that you're not building them on site. They can be prefabricated, like an assembly line type approach to it.

Do you need a water source?

Yes, it needs water. You need to have water for cooling, but otherwise, just a small amount of land.

Why and how do you know so much about nuclear?

I was on the Senate Energy Committee, and I look at energy as the lifeblood of our economy. I look at, as I said in my remarks here, energy means jobs.

Energy means making our businesses more competitive.

•••

Governor Allen has much more to say on everything from President Trump to whale sanctuaries, no-bail policies, and such. Next week, we’ll bring you part two of his informative conversation.