Arizona's heated Senate debate goes atomic
In a heated Senate debate against MAGA hardliner Kari Lake, Ruben Gallego pitches one big climate solution.
This morning I watched caught up on last night’s Arizona Senate debate between Democrat Ruben Gallego and Republican Kari Lake, thinking an hour-long parley over issues in a state that just ended a historic 113-day streak of temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (about 37.7 degrees Celsius) might include some interesting back-and-forth over climate change and energy.
When moderators finally asked about rising temperatures about 46 minutes in, Lake answered first. She warned that electricity prices were too high, putting life-saving air conditioning out of reach. Her solution was a rehash of Fox News talking points on fossil fuels, a familiar pledge to “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas Arizona does not produce and complete the canceled Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from Canada through the Upper Midwest.
Gallego’s pitch was direct: More nuclear power.
New reactors, he said, are the “quickest thing we could do to make sure we can continue the growth we have in Arizona with manufacturing and residential to make sure we can meet that.”
“We have to first accept that climate change is happening. We prepare for that by actually having a very resilient grid,” he said. “We need to bring in more baseload energy. That’s going to have to be nuclear.”
Arizona’s one nuclear power plant, the Palo Verde Generating Station just west of Phoenix, more than a quarter of the entire state’s electricity. The three-reactor facility was the largest nuclear plant in the U.S. until earlier this year, when Georgia’s Plant Vogtle finished building the country’s first two new reactors from scratch this century.
Gallego, a Marine Corps veteran who currently serves as a U.S. congressman, appears to want to reclaim the state’s atomic edge. While Arizona has no active oil and gas production, it is a major mining state — particularly of uranium.
That wasn’t the only spicy moment from last night’s debate.
You can read more about it here on HuffPost.