For many years now those with a different idea of what America should be have been chipping away at our Constitution to where we are now.....
"Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties."
-Abraham Lincoln
The Constitution was written to protect us from the very thing that is happening now. A corrupt government out of control with little if any concern for our liberties.
"Government big enough to supply everthing you need is big enough to take everything you have. The course of history shows us that as a government grows, liberty decreases."
-Thomas Jefferson
The foresight of these individuals was/is truly astounding.
we as a nation have done little to decrease the balance of trade or decrease our dependence on foreign products. So we export manufacturing to low wage locations and buy low cost products made where we shipped the jobs to. We're proud of a strong dollar and that keeps us buying foreign goods.
When it comes to imported energy, we're like a crack addict that thinks we don't have a problem as long as crack is cheap.
We can't have it both ways. We were not coerced into this position, we walked, even ran, willingly down this path. Now we don't like the view from where we've ended up.
In 74, we, as a nation, recognized that dependance on foreign energy supplies was undermining national security. We gave up doing much about it about a decade later. So we kept hitting on the crack pipe of the cheapest energy we could find.
I'm sure I'll catch a lot of crap for this view, but WTF, seems to me we're in a position where it's what goes around, comes around. We want to take advantage of resources whereever we can find them to our economic advantage. Every group or nation is dominated by some degree of self interest. Who's surprised that other groups will grab at whatever lever they can find to advance thier interests? We've been doing that since our formation.
As far as theKraushaulers revisionist history and fear mongering, at the end he concludes what I guess eventually will happen. There will be congressional action to re-define the role of the EPA and life will go on. There are just too many interest who don't want this kind of change to allow this to stand, independent of the validity (or lack there of for the sceptics) of the EPA's reasoning. It won't have been the first time that congressional action has had consiquences that congress didn't intend (or imagine) when the original law was passed, and it won't be the last.
I agree with Matt in that this has all been a long time coming. I watch science and engineering television programs from the 1970's, and I hear all of the same topics and points of view that I'm hearing today, just with slightly different wording.
I vote for more alternative energy, and in my definition, that means alternatives to burning fossil fuels. In short, to me it means the lowest-cost power there is: nuclear power plants. Build them with new generation designs instead of forty year old plans. Maintain them like fine watches, but don't strangle them to death with unnecessary regulations or price controls (many power plants have more than ten times as many people filing regulatory paperwork as they have people running the plant). Use their power as we develop other power generation technologies. Phase them out as we (finally!) build large solar arrays, and/or fusion power plants, or whatever our imaginations produce.
Totally agree Dr Mike, I'm all for alternative energy sources, More effiency in everything from Hair dryers to Bulldozers and if we could solve the storage problem with solar energy we would all benefit from it and the world would be a better place for us and our children!! BUT, government assistance in achieving this should be through regulations that excite the possibilities and force the private sector to work on it, NOT THROUGH TAXATION and redistributing wealth.
You cant force the private sector, you can however ease rules, regulations, and taxes so the technoligy is profitable and encourage growth in wanted areas such as energy, redistrubition of wealth will only lead to chaos and eventually revolution, which is a road none of us want to travel.
poisons everywhere slowly, nuclear poisons a local area quickly. Pretty much everything else we do is based on the "dump" model, but for some reason nuclear is held up as something that competes against the perfect.
We have long term storage problems based on the "once through" model as one way to keep the spread of nuclear weapons at bay. There are other models where reprocessed fuels are used in reactors, and this tends to burn up and convert the long lived byproducts. The the storage problem is reduced a couple orders of magnitude in time. There are many that advocate this type of switch, and doing away with the "once through" paradigm.
Anyway, we'll need them all, the appetite for fuel is truely without end. I really think this one puts it in perspective....
Nuclear fuel reprocessing is a safe activity that should be part of America’s nuclear energy program. It can be affordable and is technologically feasible. The French are proving that on a daily basis. The question is: Why can’t oui?
but a lot of it comes down to the regulatory hurdles combined with public perception. The public attitude isn't really changing, but the regulatory hurdles are getting combined so that it's less repettitive and will cost less to go through the process. But this is just for comissioning plants. I think the US is still on the "once through" model for fuel.
I'll dig up some stuff on the issues of once through vs reprocessing and re-use.
This really kills me that with reprocessing something like 96% of the waste is eliminated and yet we can't do this in the US for fear of another Three-Mile Island or Chernobyl happening. You look at all the nuclear powered used by the Navy in the past half century and look at the safety record of that and it's obvious the fears are unfounded. I friend of mine with experience working on naval nuclear equipment says that a Geiger counter registers more radiation on the opposite end of the boat than it does right next to the reactor, the radiation is controlled that well.
the once through paradigm is that if there's no reprocessing, it's harder to make plutonium bombs. It's not to prevent TMI or Chernobyl, but a philosophy to retard the spread of weapons grade materials.
the alternative is to allow for a few reprocessing centers around the world, to contain the risk of weapons propogation, and gain the benefits of reducing the average lifetime of the waste. Once through worked pretty well for a while, but I think the tide is turning to a preference for reprocessing.
On another one of those surprises. Yucca Mountain surface radiation levels would be about 1/4 or 1/2 (I don't remember the exactly) the levels found currently in Denver due to natural and cosmic radiation.
