Title:
With Loan Guarantees, Obama Looks to Nuclear Energy
for Jobs
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Economics Report.
See text below
Text:
One year ago, President Obama signed the economic
recovery bill aimed at pulling the country out of
recession. The bill promised jobs — including many
in the nuclear energy industry.
In February, the president announced plans for the
government to guarantee more than eight billion
dollars in loans for two new nuclear energy centers
in the state of Georgia. The Southern Company plans
to build the nuclear power centers. The first would
start operations in twenty sixteen.
Mister Obama announced the plan at a job training
center in Lanham, Maryland. The message was that
nuclear energy projects will create jobs. President
Obama said: It is a plant that will create thousands
of construction jobs in the next few years, and some
eight hundred permanent jobs — well paying permanent
jobs — in the years to come.
In February, the Federal Reserve predicted that
unemployment will remain near current levels through
the year. The present rate is nine point seven
percent. The central bank said unemployment could
remain high for the next two years.
President Obama has received sharp criticism from
Republicans over the lack of progress in job
creation.
The seven hundred eighty-seven billion dollar
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is also
unpopular because of its cost. Critics said the
money is being spent too slowly with less than sixty
percent being spent so far. But the administration
said the measure has saved or created two million
jobs.
By supporting nuclear energy, the president may be
seeking common ground with Republicans who have
called for building as many as one hundred new
nuclear power centers.
Mister Obama has linked clean energy with economic
growth. He also warned that the United States is
falling behind in developing nuclear energy. He
said: There are fifty-six nuclear reactors under
construction in the world: twenty-one in China
alone; six in South Korea and five in India.
The United States has not built a new nuclear power
plant in nearly thirty years. American public
opinion about nuclear energy has been mixed. In
recent years, public opinion studies show more than
half of Americans approve of nuclear energy. About
one-fifth of the nations electricity is generated by
nuclear power.
And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
