2/16/10

Tell Me It Ain't So

But of course it is. Obama feels the need to advance legislation by performing nuclear hand job on the Repuglicans.

The administration hopes that by reaching out to Republicans on the nuclear issue -- a top priority for key opposition lawmakers such as former presidential candidate John McCain -- that support for the stalled bill will grow.

Where is the benefit for we the people? It's not there and this is something we got but don't want. Someone tell me when the the repugs start voting for the things that we want. This will change nothing!

8 comments:

  1. the way I see it he's doing the right thing. this is just a start in my opinion. it's safe and when we get the balls as a country or maybe a planet to fire the atomic trash into space it makes sense. This plus solar, hydro, wind and wave all have the ability to ween us off the petroleum teet.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm with Lahru here. Just because Republicans are for it doesn't mean it's inherently evil. The Chinese plan to build one nuclear reactor per month for the next ten years to wean themselves off of coal-fired power plants that are literally poisoning their children, as well as investing heavily in wind turbines (they're now the biggest manufacturer of wind turbines) and solar panels. Wind and solar make great peaking power, but simply lack the energy density to maintain a technological society -- and we have too many freakin' people to go back to being a non-technological society, probably 2/3rds of the American public would starve to death within the first five years if we tried that.

    As for the fuel, short-term radioactives are the ones most dangerous to human health, and those are mostly gone after ten years of sitting in a cooling-off tank at the reactor. The remainder decay so slowly that there's places where the rocks emit more radiation than those wastes do. The notion that nuclear wastes that have been cooled down will make you glow in the dark or some shit is greeny scientific illiteracy, not fact. Liquified nuclear wastes leaking from Hanford and other such facilities are a major problem, but they're a major problem for the same reason that arsenic or cyanide leaking from those facilities would be a major problem -- because heavy metals simply are bad for people and little fishies -- not because cooled-down nuclear wastes pose any special risk to human life.

    - Badtux the Nuclear Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  3. He's kissing their ass thinking he'll get something in return but won't. Not enough is being done in respect to conservation and the mentality that as a society we just use as much as we want as usual.

    Water here in NW Colorado is big and it won't be that long and the powers will soon have their hands on one of the last free flowing rivers left. There are several plans in the works already on how to get this down to the front range. The situation with the water from the Colorado River is worse. Ranchers who have used water from it for decades soon can kiss that good bye.

    I have no issues with your points guys - I just want to see more conservation,education and implementation of alternative resources. Just don't think it there at the level it needs to be.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dude. You *did* know that the USA uses less energy today than it used in 1980? Yes?

    And I don't know about out there in Colorado, but here in California we have wind farms at most of the mountain passes, and solar farms in most of our deserts, and a lot of houses are getting solar panels on them thanks to various tax breaks. This is all useful, and California will be getting 20% of its energy from those sources within ten years or so. But what about the other 80%? Are we supposed to just shiver in the dark? Dude. I ain't fond of shivering in the dark, yo. But we keep up with this fossil fuel stuff, we either gonna be shivering in the dark, or gurgling underwater thanks to oceans rising, or dying of thirst as our warmed-up interior dries out. None of that appeals to me either.

    Now you see why I think we need mo nukes? The French seem to be doing okay -- not a single Frenchman has died of nuclear power, and they get 98% of their electricity from nuclear or from renewable sources. The French gave the FU to Big OIl and Big Coal when it came to electricity. If the French can do it, you're saying Americans are too stupid, corrupt, or insane to do it? Huh. Not exactly a winning argument.

    - Badtux the Energy Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  5. WTF! What's so hard to understand that the position I took in my comment that we -

    Need to conserve more because we continue to consume at will and I don't give a shit if it's less than before because it's not good enough given what we are facing in the future. You're being mean and I don't fucking like it and there's no need for that.

    Obama is kissing their ass again and that's the truth of the matter.

    Our side will lose in the long run because people on the left will argue to death what they think is right without finding the common ground needed to fight the goose steppers on the other side that never waver on what they stand for.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, my point was that we can't conserve our way out of the fact that technological civilization requires energy -- a *lot* of energy -- and solar and wind ain't gonna provide enough even if we *do* conserve even more than we're already doing. And we can't do without technological civilization without a lot of dead bodies. We have a choice of technological civilization, or mass starvation and a lot of shivering in the dark. That's it. That's all we have left. We done burned, consumed, destroyed, polluted, or smelted every readily-available low-energy way of living until there ain't enough of it left to keep even 1/10th of the world's population alive if technological civilization collapses due to lack of energy.

    You're looking at the near term picture, and I'm looking at the long-term picture where we don't have any coal or oil left. Maybe technological civilization ain't what we'd all like, but it's either that, or a buncha dead bodies. Meaning we need energy -- and a lot of it, because technological civilization replaces all those low-energy resources we don't have anymore with high-energy resources. It takes a *lot* of energy to build a solar panel or a windmill -- last I heard, it takes five years before a solar panel or windmill even returns back the energy used to make it. And that energy ain't gonna be coming out of the ground mighty soon...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thank you for that BTux! For whatever it's worth I try to leave a small footprint. Could not R&D into alternatives become a factor and if you haven't I'd like to read your thoughts on this country's relationship with nuclear energy.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm in one of the centers of R&D into alternatives and believe me, it's happening. There's a new generation of solar cells coming up, for example, that will cut the price of solar energy by 90% once they're commercialized. The problem is one that I mentioned in early 2007: energy density. Or maybe we can go back to late 2005 where I talked about anti-nuclear lunatics making ridiculous claims about safety. And then in 2008 I talked about the environmental problems that mass wind and wave energy farms could cause. So anyhow, this is something I've been thinking about for a while, and come to the conclusion that we need nuclear power because if we don't have it, then we're going to have a lot of dead bodies in the long run. Reducing your footprint is all fine and good, but even if individual consumers used *zero* energy (hah!), the needs of our food production and distribution system alone outstrip what we can do with solar and wind power... and there's just too many people to go back to low-energy methods of farming again, because low-energy farming just doesn't have the yields or the ability to feed large cities.

    ReplyDelete