(WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The Illinois General Assembly is moving closer to ending the state's three-decade-long moratorium on building nuclear power plants.
First off, there are environmentalists who say nuclear power is not clean energy and that the problem is what to do with nuclear waste.
"It's not a technical problem. It's a political problem," said Robert Rosner, former director of Argonne National Laboratory and professor at the University of Chicago in astronomy, astrophysics and physics.
"At least two countries are now in the process of dealing with the waste, with a repository and I think both most Americans realize are reasonable places where we wouldn't mind living - Sweden and Finland."
If the moratorium on building nuclear plants is lifted, Rosner wonders what will actually happen.
"The question is really an economic one. Whether or not utilities like Exelon, or Constellation I guess in this case, would actually go ahead with constructing these kinds of plants," he said.
Roger Blomquist is the principal nuclear engineer at Argonne National Laboratory.
"Illinois needs to lift this moratorium, if for no other reason than other states are lifting theirs and other states are vying for nuclear projects - and that's going to be a problem for Illinois in an economic competitiveness sense," he said.
"In Illinois we have lots of coal plants. They would be ideal locations for, especially, some of these Small Modular Reactors. And there's a workforce already. The towns exist."
Blomquist also said the current nuclear waste repositories are temporary - right now, at the reactor sites and they're "not really a risk to anybody."
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