Moonage Political Webdream

href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,154734,00.html">President Bush is offering to make closed military bases available for new oil
refineries and will ask Congress to provide a “risk insurance” to the nuclear
industry against regulatory delays to spur construction of new nuclear power
plants, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

The officials,
who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the president will outline his
proposals in a speech Wednesday in which he intends to emphasize how new
technologies can be used to ease the energy supply crunch.

The White House
acknowledged that none of the initiatives was expected to provide any short-term
relief from soaring gasoline and oil prices. It is Bush’s second speech on
energy within a week, reflecting the growing concern within the White House over
the political fallout over high energy prices.

The officials
said the president believes the country needs a diverse supply of
energy, including expansion of aggressive nuclear power. There has not
been a new commercial nuclear reactor ordered in the United States since
1973.

That’s the opening salvo from Fox.? As of this posting it’s conjecture based
on anonymous sources, of which I usually don’t like to respond to.? However,
given the meeting with the Saudis and his previous speech this week, I have
reason to believe it might be accurate conjecture.? So, I’m going to run with
it.

The details of this conjecture opens all kinds of cans of worms to me.? I am
a huge advocate of nuclear power.? The only drawback is the waste, and there are
ideas floating around on how to deal with that.? But, that takes energy,
something we don’t have a lot to spare right now, and, makes the conjecture
prohibitively expensive.? That’s, the crux of the biscuit.

There are a lot of things that will happen once we have energy to spare.?
When the US had coal energy to spare, the manufacturing boom of the early 20th
century took off.? Once the US had electrical energy to spare and we realized
the problems of burning huge amounts of coal, society started demanding
different types of things to satisfy our needs.? Gas stoves were replaced by
electrical stoves and microwaves, fireplaces replaced by forced air heatpumps,
and cars started utilizing electronics to run more efficiently.? In addition, we
had the advent of computers, cell phones, massive television sets and everything
else that has altered mankind since the 1950’s.? But, that energy was basically
limited to our homes.? With the advent of power cells and low resistance metals,
energy has the technology available now to expand outside our homes and
revolutionize how we travel and work.? However, it’s expensive.? And, since we
don’t have a lot of energy to spare, the cost of the energy doesn’t compel
consumers to look beyond burning petroleum for transportation as our
grandparents did about the time the lightbulb became popular.

The key for the US and the world to move beyond 19th century technology is
the availability of energy.? There has to be more than enough to force a major
difference between the cost of burning petroleum and using electricity.? It
can’t be about the same.? It will be a while before electrical motors for
transportation will have the sexy attraction of raw power that petroleum offers,
so there has to be a compelling reason for people to switch.? That reason will
be cost.? If a person could travel 500 miles for $5, that would be a compelling
reason.? Someone has to be able to make money in order to offer that $5
recharge, and, it will have to be the distributors.? In order for the
distributor to make any money at $5, they have to have more than enough cheap
electricity to sell it at about $1.? The markup for them at $5 is much more than
they make selling gasoline at $30 a fill-up.? In order for them to make any
money on volume, the product has to be there.? In order for that product to be
there, the demand for that product has to be there.? It’s a circle that has
refused to be broken for thirty years.? Someone has to kick start the process.?
I hope to God that someone truly is Bush.? ? The current nuclear capacity of the
US is about 20% of the demand for electricity.? That doesn’t account
for the demand used by automobiles, since they don’t use electricity.?

The key here is not to build enough reactors to alleviate the foreign reliance
on petroleum to cover the electrical demand, but to build MORE reactors
than that need, drive down the cost of electricity, thus compelling other needs
for electricity.? That primary need would be personal transportation.?
Make it so cheap that people will be attracted to the odd shaped muscle-less
vehicles that are on the market now.  Needless to say, that won’t mean
building five or ten reactors.  That will require building probably fifty
to one hundred.

Are the environmentalists freaked out yet?  Bush originally tossed
around a nuclear policy in 2001,
they
attacked it before it was ever even policy:

"The Bush-Cheney administration’s promotion of nuclear
energy is distressingly short-sighted and potentially dangerous," said Kyle
Rabin, Nuclear Energy Policy Project Director for the Albany-based Environmental
Advocates. "It’s all about denial and fantasy: Denying the nuclear meltdowns and
near disasters; fantasizing that Yucca Mountain will solve the country’s
radioactive waste problems. Nuclear power must be phased out and elsewhere in
the nation. The environmental community will fight any attempts to build new
nukes and to breathe new life into existing plants. Our state political leaders
and policymakers must also have the courage to stand up to the nuclear industry,
whose time has come and gone."

The primary opposition has always been what to do with
nuclear waste.  Now, I live in the coal capitol of the country, Kentucky. 
I’ve seen the ravages of coal waste runoff into streams.  A couple of weeks
ago an abandoned mine
blew out and destroyed a highway in eastern Kentucky.  The waste from
that blowout went right into the Kentucky River.  The effects of the pretty
much abandoned coal industry in Kentucky of nearly 50 to 100 years ago is still
haunting this region.  People are still dying in coal mines. 

As of 2003, the record low of 67 people died in Kentucky coal mines. 
There is nothing tangibly safe about harvesting and using fossil fuels. 
But, these environmentalists offer no viable alternative to what we are doing
now, thus continuing the cycle of relying on something more dangerous to both
man and the environment than the possible worst case scenario they offer at
Yucca Mountain.  I
am an environmentalist.  I know the harm their policies are causing. 
It’s time to ignore them because they are accomplishing nothing and are
hindering progress to more environmentally friendly energy sources.

But, there are some
environmentalists already seeing the light:

Environmentalists for Nuclear Power (MFK in short) is a politically and
economically independent Society founded in 1988 by environmentalists who were
tired of the ongoing Swedish energy debate dominated by a completely unrealistic
anti-nuclear propaganda.

We are participating in the debate with facts and knowledge rather than
with the usual prejudices and beliefs. Health, environment and economy must be
taken into consideration and nuclear power must be judged under the same
conditions as other alternatives for the Swedish electricity supply.

Replacing clean nuclear power with polluting fuels like coal, gas, oil or
biomass would be a historic mistake - both environmentally and economically. The
waste of monetary resources would be astronomic and we would have to pay for it,
as electricity users, employees and as tax payers. Emissions of sulphur,
nitrogen and carbon dioxide, which Sweden, thanks to nuclear power, has been
able to keep low, would rise rapidly again. A clean environment might be costly
- but why should we pay for a worse environment?

The support can be there for Bush’s initiatives.  He
needs to grab it and march them all over the country in the spotlight. 
In order to spur aggressive expansion of nuclear energy, regulations will have
to be softened.  That always attracts activists like flies to light ( I
sure prefer another phrase ).  He’ll need activists fighting just as loudly
for his agenda as he’ll have against those changes.  They’re out there. 
I’m one of them.

The only thing I don’t want is refineries on the closed
military bases.  In this day of organized terror, they need security in the
worst way.  Put the reactors on those bases and leave some of the military
there to guard them.

Other than that, LET’S GO!  Man will not burn fossil
fuels forever.  That is a fact.  The sooner people realize that the
better it will be for our children.  There will be mistakes and accidents,
but we’re already suffering a lot of deaths and destruction every year burning
fossil fuels.  There is no logical reason I know of to keep putting off
nuclear power.  None.  The sooner we start relying on nuclear power,
the sooner new breakthroughs will occur making it safer and more efficient. 
The longer we put it off, the longer those breakthroughs will take.  The
people protesting nuclear power use the learning curve as evidence against it. 
What they don’t see is they are the problem with the learning curve.  Get
out of the way and let’s work the bugs out now, not put it off for another
generation.

This is a rant I know.  But, it’s something I am
passionate about.

Contact your representatives and tell them to encourage the Bush nuclear
initiatives.  Fighting it has accomplished nothing in 30 years.

Technorati Tags: Government, Legislative Process, National Politics, Opinions, Political Correctness

Tags: Government, Legislative Process, National Politics, Opinions, Political Correctness

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