Today, Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-3), chair of the Financial Services Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions, led the hearing entitled, “International Financing of Nuclear Energy.”

“Clean nuclear power, such as that produced back in my district at Ameren’s Callaway nuclear plant, accounts for over a quarter of the world’s low-carbon electricity, and nearly 20 percent of all electricity in our country,” Rep. Luetkemeyer said. “For today’s hearing, we took great care to ensure our panel reflects scientific expertise, and I am pleased to see that many of our witnesses have engineering backgrounds. If we want to find genuine solutions to promote national security through nuclear energy policy, it needs to be fact-based and free of outdated ideologies."   

Watch the full remarks HERE.

Background: Nuclear is one of the safest of all energy sources, even compared to other low-carbon options. One analysis has estimated that the death rate from accidents and air pollution associated with nuclear energy is lower than that for wind and hydropower, even after taking the 1986 Chernobyl disaster into account. In 2019, Financial Services Republicans created the China and Transformational Exports Program at the Export-Import Bank (EXIM), which allows the Bank to offer fully competitive financing terms to counteract Chinese financing of nuclear technologies abroad.