With no further utterance from Mitt Romney regarding Cold Fusion since his brief flirtation with the subject last year, it is worth taking a look at his plan to beat the energy crisis. On his personal website he has published “Mitt’s Plan”.

It becomes optimistically, “As president, Mitt Romney will make every effort to safeguard the environment, but he will be mindful at every step of also protecting the jobs of American workers. This will require putting conservative principles into action.”

His first step would be significant regulatory reform, designed to “facilitate rapid progress in the development of our domestic reserves of oil and natural gas and allow for further investment in nuclear power.” This section of the plan appears to involve tinkering with the existing licensing laws although there are a couple of noteworthy items. He intends to amend the clean air act to exclude carbon dioxide from purview and expand NRC capabilities for approval of additional nuclear reactor designs. He further develops this point by suggesting streamlining NRC processes to ensure that licensing decisions for reactors on or adjacent to approved sites, using approved designs, are complete within two years,

He then proposes increasing production, saying that, “The United States is blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources. Developing them has been a pathway to prosperity for the nation in the past and offers similar promise for the future.” Perhaps the most eye-catching proposals behind the rhetoric are expanding opportunities for U.S. resource developers to forge partnerships with neighbouring countries and supporting construction of pipelines to bring in Canadian oil – basically getting the oil from elsewhere?

Finally he claims that he will concentrate alternative energy funding on basic research. He states that, “History shows that the United States has moved forward in astonishing ways thanks to national investment in basic research and advanced technology. However, we should not be in the business of steering investment toward particular politically favoured approaches. That is a recipe for both time and money wasted on projects that do not bring us dividends. The failure of windmills and solar plants to become economically viable or make a significant contribution to our energy supply is a prime example.” Have the windmills and solar plants been officially recognised as failures?

Whilst Mitt’s Plan is not exactly groundbreaking, it does at least dip a toe in the water of addressing the serious issue of our energy resources. But is this enough?

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