Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never… - Jimmy Carter

Our national energy plan is based on 10 fundamental principles. The first principle is that we can have an effective and comprehensive energy policy only if the Government takes responsibility for it and if the people understand the seriousness of the challenge and are willing to make sacrifices. The second principle is that healthy economic growth must continue. Only by saving energy can we maintain our standard of living and keep our people at work. An effective conservation program will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The third principle is that we must protect the environment. Our energy problems have the same cause as our environmental problems-wasteful use of resources. Conservation helps us solve both problems at once. The fourth principle is that we must reduce our vulnerability to potentially devastating embargoes. We can protect ourselves from uncertain supplies by reducing our demand for oil, by making the most of our abundant resources such as coal, and by developing a strategic petroleum reserve. The fifth principle is that we must be fair. Our solutions must ask equal sacrifices from every region, every class of people, and every interest group. Industry will have to do its part to conserve just as consumers will. The energy. producers deserve fair treatment, but we will not let the oil companies profiteer. The sixth principle, and the cornerstone of our policy, is to reduce demand through conservation. Our emphasis on conservation is a clear difference between this plan and others which merely encouraged crash production efforts. Conservation is the quickest, cheapest, most practical source of energy. Conservation is the only way that we can buy a barrel of oil for about $2. It costs about $13 to waste it. The seventh principle is that prices should generally reflect the true replacement cost of energy. We are only cheating ourselves if we make energy artificially cheap and use more than we can really afford. The eighth principle is that Government policies must be predictable and certain. Both consumers and producers need policies they can count on so they can plan ahead. This is one reason that I'm working with the Congress to create a new Department of Energy to replace more than 50 different agencies that now have some control over energy. The ninth principle is that we must conserve the fuels that are scarcest and make the most of those that are plentiful. We can't continue to use oil and gas for 75 percent of our consumption, as we do now, when they only make up 7 percent of our domestic reserves. We need to shift to plentiful coal, while taking care to protect the environment, and to apply stricter safety standards to nuclear energy. The tenth and last principle is that we must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy that we will rely on in the next century. Now, these 10 principles have guided the development of the policy that I will describe to you and the Congress on Wednesday night.

As you know, we have a longstanding treaty with the Soviet Union preventing any atomic explosions in space. But we were guilty of that a long time ago. I think it's time to reexamine that question. I believe that this recent incident with the Soviet satellite has shown that we don't have an adequate, guaranteed safety requirement on nuclear fuel in space. This particular satellite and all those that we've ever launched—I think the first one we put up using nuclear power was in 1965—they have what's called a subcritical mass there's not enough radioactivity there to cause an explosion under any circumstances. And when the satellite is first launched, it's relatively clean; you could get probably close to it without having radiation. The longer it burns, the more byproducts are made and the more radioactive they become. This particular satellite was designed, as are most of them, to be elevated into a higher orbit when it had served its purpose. And when the Soviets attempted to elevate it into a higher orbit, which would have kept it in space for a thousand years or more, some mechanism failed—I don't know the details of it. But I think that we now are in the process of deciding' what we can do to minimize this danger from space. One possibility would be to design such a nuclear powerplant, which is very small, so that it would surely burn completely as it came down through space itself by increasing the drag of friction, and so forth. Another one would be to have standby mechanisms, so that if the first one failed to eject it into outer orbit, another standby would be required. This is something that we have not yet gone into in any definitive way. We have a much higher reliance, as you may know, on solar panel power supplies, and we do not rely on the atomic power supplies as much. But you have a good question. It's something that we have not yet addressed with the Soviets, but I'm sure it's something that we will address.

We cannot know the mystery of the future.