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Those things that are far worse than a radiation leak
Michael Swickard
While the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, many political aftershocks are being felt strongly in our country. Much debate involves nuclear energy being used for domestic power generation. Sadly, so much being said about nuclear energy generation just is not so.
When it comes to nuclear power generation, we Americans are standing on a whale fishing for minnows. We have no vision. It all starts with our national energy policy. Shuckins, that is right, we do not have one. When Americans talk about energy policy, we are blind. Worse than blind, stupid. Worse than blind and stupid, intentionally so.
It has been four decades since the worldwide energy crisis began in the early 1970s, and our nation still has no real energy policy. Year after year politicians pontificate, but Americans have no unified policy of discovery, deployment and extension.
The closest to an energy policy this nation has found is really an anti-energy policy pushed by the “green” political agenda. Not only is this not an energy policy, it has no real standing because “green” technologies rely upon traditional energy sources for validity. For every wind farm there must be a traditional source of power standing by for when the wind stops. Wind and solar as a mainstream energy source do not make energy sense.
Our nation could not have done worse in our 40 years in the energy wilderness. We had no Moses. When the first energy crisis began in 1973 politicians rightly said that we had to get off of foreign oil to put our country’s future into our own hands. Then they did everything they could to do the opposite. We are far more fragile as a nation now than we were 40 years ago.
Prey to those with an anti-nuclear agenda
As to the conniption in Japan, the powerful earthquake did little damage but the resultant tsunami was devastating beyond the structural damage.
First, it made the Japanese prey to people who are trying to use an anti-nuclear agenda rather than deal with Japan’s problems.
Second, it uncovered some bad civil engineering design. In the early 1950s, Japan put the power controls for several first-generation nuclear power plants on the ocean side of the power plants. There were engineering reasons for that placement but it put the backup power directly in the path of the tsunami wave that then took out the backup control power.
If those secondary power sources were on the other side of the plant, we would not be worried about nuclear issues. Frankly, the bad design ran 60 years without a problem until a very tall wave of water showed the lunacy of putting the diesel generation on the incorrect side of the nuclear plant.
Power is life
The overall lesson in Japan, though, is being missed by most people. While it is appropriate to have some concern about the nuclear power generation, there is something far worse and deadly than having a nuclear incident in a power plant. It is having no power at all. Consider this: It is winter in Japan, and with 11 of their 51 reactors out and/or offline, they are being threatened with actual real death by lack of power.
Japan lost several nuclear plant generation inputs and several more traditional generation plants with the wall of water. So they are faced with rolling blackouts, food shortages, disruption of transportation and the intentional effort to inappropriately scare their population by anti-nuclear political action groups.
A concern about the danger of radiation is appropriate within the science realm. This is not that; rather, it is way beyond making sense. While leaking radiation is bad, having no power at all is far much worse because in our world today no power equals humans who cannot survive. I am not trying to scare you; I am just stating a fact that most people ignore. Power is life; lack of power is death.
We Americans take energy for granted. A month without any energy in New Mexico and most of the population would be dead. Not suffering, dead. All that sustains our lives starts with energy. And we, as a nation, have no coherent energy policy. It is time to stop talking and start getting a real, sustainable policy.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on KSNM-AM 570 in Las Cruces and throughout the state through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.
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Nuclear waste problem in this nation is horrendous and expensive. No solution in sight.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/23/us-nuclear-waste-radioactive-storage_n_839438.html
qofdisks, you are right on. The extension of your point is that the government corrupts the fact as well as the possibility of a free market in energy. But notice that energy companies play a double game to the same end. First, they advocate “free markets” which are “free” of government regulations; the effect is to transfer risks, consequences, and their costs to the public. Or they advocate government subsidies and liability caps which again transfer risks, consequences, and their costs to the public. The new capitalism is that equity holders get the profits and the public incurs the risks and gets the losses.
Living on Earth said this morning that the cooling pools for the nuclear reactors in this country are at 300 percent over capacity with spent radioactive rods. The reactors have no back up generators to keep the shamefully overloaded cooling pools circulating. Back up power was omitted as a requirement for these reactors. OOPS.
The federal government under Obama is planning to provide loan guarantees for more nuclear plants so that the if there is a mishap, taxpayers are left bailing out the industry. Once again this business of privatizing profits while the taxpayers shoulder ALL the risk, (socializing the losses).
“The error in this dialog is a false analogy: since Chernobyl blew up all nuclear technology will blow up. The Japanese ran their nuclear industry poorly (I do not know they did) so nuclear industry everywhere can only be run poorly. It would make more sense to demand that nuclear energy be run responsibly and have appropriate oversight.
Core question: are you saying that nuclear energy cannot be run responsibly because there is some property about nuclear energy (evilness inherent to nuclear energy) that causes all management of it to always be bad?”
Well, here is one vital property about nuclear energy that is inherently evil. That is the socialization of risk. The incentives are such that the industry is guaranteed to poorly construct and manage the power plants. If private investors find it too risky to back the financing of the industry, it is too risky.
If there is a guarantee that the nuclear industry would be bailed out in any case, the short term profiteers will run the show cutting corners and wages as they pay themselves handsomely the whole time giving themselves opulent bonuses. When the plants fail, the U.S. taxpayer is left to pay off all the loans as well as the long term radioactive devastation. The guys at the top get rich without the burden of tempering responsibility.
Perhaps the capitalist paradigm is not going to work for alternative energies to be efficient
I think that the merged capitalist-socialist paradigm of tax breaks and subsidies to encourage alternative energy will work. …as soon as the subsidies that go towards carbon-based energies end. http://www.eli.org/pdf/Energy_Subsidies_Black_Not_Green.pdf
But if the choice is between global capitalism and the future of the human race, I’m gonna have to go with the continued existence of my species.
“but that does not mean that we should NOT move in that direction for the sake of our national security and well being.”
Sorry for the mistake, the kid interrupted my thoughts.
artiofab,
That is why I suggest that we cover our roof-tops with the solar panels and use the existing grid to distribute the electricity. We don’t have to concentrate collection somewhere else. We can do it where we live. The reason that people want a solar plant with it’s own grid is for reasons of collecting wealth and money and exerting exclusive grid rights to private owners. If we nationalize the solar grid and all the pre-existing infrastructure, it will work. Perhaps the capitalist paradigm is not going to work for alternative energies to be efficient. Using energy needs as an excuse of for wealth stripping the public will not work, but that does not mean that we should move in that direction for the sake of our national security and well being.
Mr. Hays:
I’ll agree that solar and wind (and hydroelectricity) all suffer from the elemental problem of collection: while there is lots of energy capable of being derived from these sources, utilizing air/land/water for power purposes often demarcates that space from being useful for anything else, sometimes at the cost of habitable space for species besides ourselves. There’s not much point in switching to renewable energy to stop anthropogenic global warming if we cover over all the Sonoran desert with solar panels and kill off all the unique organisms which live there. This is why I think that wind and solar farms work best when they are combined with other, already existing, human-utilized land: put solar panels on top of buildings, put wind turbines on farms and ranches.
I’m not a zealot, I agree that renewable energy is not a perfect solution to the world energy problems of 2011, but I also think that energy production needs to move away from 19th and 20th century solutions. That means weaning ourselves off carbon as quickly as possible. That means weaning ourselves off fission when we can afford to. And it also means being smart about the entire transition as possible.
artiofab,
While i support wind and solar among other energy technologies, your claims omit a great deal and reveal precisely the problem with advocacy of only one or two energy technologies. First, the amount of total area insolation is irrelevant; the amount collectable is, Second, you mention storage and distribution as the problems; you omit collection. To provide 1500 W per citizen requires enormous numbers of windmills and enormous areas of solar panels. The environmental effects of both are adverse and non-trivial.
perpetual
That’s the word I was looking for, not infinite. Sorry my brain isn’t always on top of things.
You seem to have three arguments.
1) Wind and solar have start-up costs in terms of energy and materials, so they are bad. I don’t see how this argument does not apply to any source of power. Nuclear power plants need to be constructed and they need fissionable material to be mined. Unlike wind and solar, they require daily maintenance, so in terms of actual cost in manhours wind and solar might succeed against nuclear.
2) Nuclear fuel rod reprocessing will supply energy for centuries, so it’s good. This is an as-of-yet untested prediction. You are correct in that the US did stop reprocessing for political, not scientific reasons. The political reason du jour was to prevent nuclear proliferation in lieu of India and Pakistan getting the bomb. If that political reason has gone away then maybe reprocessing should be brought back? Of course there’s also an economic concern. Plus it doesn’t get rid of all the waste…
3) Wind and solar are not dense enough to provide power for the future, so it’s bad. This is also an as-of-yet untested prediction. Right now the US uses about 1500 watts (1.5kW) of power an hour per person. http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/colorgifs/208.GIF As that graphic shows, all of the US states receive more than this amount of solar insolation per hour when we average all the months of the year. What is lacking is an efficient manner to store and distribute this potential energy so that, for example, Seattle can be powered when it is not a sunny day. But I already said that.
On energy issues, the real density belongs to people who advocate one or two technologies and reject all others. Energy technologies should be regarded as a portfolio tailored to provide robustness to supply. In the Northwest, for instance, hydro-electric makes a lot of sense; in Kansas, not so much. In coastal mountains or midwestern plains, wind power makes a lot of sense. And so forth.
What is required is an efficient, reliable grid to transmit power generated anywhere, from any source, to end users.
All energy technologies have strengths and weaknesses. The development and deployment of all technologies require informed political decisions, not a lot of ideological gibberish. And the market should be free: no subsidies, no loopholes, etc. for any energy technology or industry–period. Nuclear power is a viable candidate for baseload, to reduce or replace reliance on fossil-fuel power (oil, gas, and coal). As I have written on my blog, the threat of nuclear power is posed by short-cuts to reduce costs, which increase the risks of deadly and expensive catastrophes. We need to do a much better job of paying to avoid the risks to safety, health, and the environment in the first place, not in clean-ups afterwards.
Mr.Swickard’s dismissal of wind and solar power as significant elements of our national energy solution is akin to his advising young people not to save small amounts of money. Wait until they hit the lottery or get that government job. It will be the small steps like wind and solar and (mostly) conservation and efficient technologies that solve our energy problems.
Most of us don’t enjoy a better lifestyle by gambling on more, more, more. We spend a little less, conserve and find better uses of our money. The same holds true for energy. The days of drilling cheap oil are long gone. The idea that drilling more multi-million dollar wells is an answer fails to take into account that the cost of delivering that oil will drive this country further into the net of expensive energy, something we do not need. Why would anyone who is familiar with the costs of drilling these days advocate such an expensive and polluting form of energy? Without government subsidies in the form of tax incentives which taxpayers end up funding the cost of drilling would be such that our gas would be much higher than current prices. Why would we pursue that sort of futile policy? If we are going to subsidize any form of energy why not one that is sustainable, clean and not dependent on foreign countries hostile to our way of life? Why not pursue a policy that does not require the extraction of extremely expensive natural resources and taxpayer subsidies and is clean and non-polluting? To raise the idea of the polluting aspect of making a wind generator tips Mr.Swickard’s biased hand. That element is such an insignificant one in the lifespan of a wind generator as to be a ludicrous argument.
Wind and solar require highly manufactured equipment to harness. The equipment has a lifespan and then must be made from new material again. While the wind and sun are perpetual, the hardware to harness it is not, therefore, it is not “infinite” as you infer. Further, in the manufacturing process there is smelting pollution and energy use not being added to the “green” equation for wind and solar. They are neither infinite nor truly clean.
Nuclear fission power generation plants last considerable longer, especially with enrichment from spent rods which Americans are not doing now. France does not bury their spent waste, they save it for a time when they will make more material from the spent rods. Future generations will use our rods to make their energy. It will be used and reused for centuries much like we have used and reused gold for generations upon generation. Yes, I know nuclear material and gold are apples and oranges in some ways but focus on the issue of reuse which will be similar in that spent fuel rods can be reprocessed and used again and again like gold is recast.
In the year 3535 it seems likely a new technology will emerge, in fact, long before. But it will not be wind and solar because they are not dense enough in terms of energy. You can wish it were so all you want but those are the facts. The opposition to nuclear is political not scientific.
Dr. Swickard: Moving away from nuclear to technologies such as wind and solar is wrong. There is the political component. Yes, I know this is NM Politics and everything is politics and nothing is science for some people
I was trying to use science. If your claim is that wind and solar is wrong* then please explain why the only energy sources we have on our planet which are ‘infinite’ in abundance are inferior to energy sources which are finite. Which, to say on topic, nuclear is: uranium, much like petroleum and natural gas, will run out eventually. If we want human civilization to still be around in the year 3535, we have to switch, eventually, from finite energy sources to nigh-infinite energy sources.
*What does “wrong” mean in a scientific context? That it’s a less efficient solution? I would argue that using carbon-heavy energy sources is morally wrong because it is creating an effect the next hundred generations of humans will have to live with, without their permission. Nuclear waste is going to be around for longer than that. Is it “right” to burden the future with our trash?
The error in this dialog is a false analogy: since Chernobyl blew up all nuclear technology will blow up. The Japanese ran their nuclear industry poorly (I do not know they did) so nuclear industry everywhere can only be run poorly. It would make more sense to demand that nuclear energy be run responsibly and have appropriate oversight.
Core question: are you saying that nuclear energy cannot be run responsibly because there is some property about nuclear energy (evilness inherent to nuclear energy) that causes all management of it to always be bad?
I support nuclear energy which is run responsibly because of its energy dense characteristics which over time makes it the only really sustainable power source for a modern society that lives on power. Wind farms rated at 100 MW have been shown to never produce more than 20 percent of rated power in a sustained fashion. Those building the grid know these are only 20 MW resources. Politicians keep talking about 100 MW sources.
Calling for more oversight and better management is appropriate. Moving away from nuclear to technologies such as wind and solar is wrong. There is the political component. Yes, I know this is NM Politics and everything is politics and nothing is science for some people. I do not have anything to counter the political considerations, this is an energy question. Run nuclear correctly is the only real issue.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/19/958091/–This-is-what-a-Renewable-Energy-FutureLooks-Like!–Buh-bye!
“Crescent Dunes will be the nation’s first commercial solar power plant using salt storage to distribute energy after the sun sets, and it will be the second-largest renewable-power source in NV Energy’s fuel portfolio. The power plant will yield enough juice to power 75,000 homes during peak electric use.
The [Crescent Dunes Solar Energy] plant would be a boon to Nevada, creating 600 jobs on-site, and it would be a great source of renewable energy.
The Obama administration pledged to give plant developer SolarReserve loan guarantees this year to get the project off the ground. But, as Karoun Demirjian reported in Thursday’s Las Vegas Sun, the project may not get the guarantees because House Republicans recently voted to ax the loan guarantee program.
Why?
Republicans don’t like it because it involves renewable energy, which they apparently find detestable, and because the program was born out of the stimulus bill, which they pledged to kill.
Once again Republicans have let their blind ideology trump what’s good for the nation.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/20/957941/-Its-time-to-leave-nuclear-power-behind#comments
It’s time to leave nuclear power behind
by Laurence Lewis
Translation: He still doesn’t know what the words in question actually mean, but childish name-calling is so much easier than thinking.
Chuckle chuckle—Fellow named Sayrafiezadeh performing in Santa Fe next week describes his upbringing in a socialist household….To quote him directly, “you close ranks……the idea that we have the right answers and everybody else is an idiot. We’re the ones who knew the truth”……..Kinda fits some the folks here, especially the Wizard from the South and El Griego……….
I subscribe to Sowell’s opinion that we’re not half as smart as we think we are and with intellectuals like the aforementioned the figure is one-tenth……
Green bigot?…if the foo sh…I mean if the shoe fits, wear it……
Swickard continues to grace us with his regressive thinking.
Gas prices through the roof because of “instability in Libya.” Oil dollars prop up dictatorial regimes in Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran…
Swickards answer – lets not look to other solutions, cause they’re “green” (and we know from his other rants, Green is bad). Drill baby drill!
Potential lethal radiation leaks close to 20+ million people in Japan…
Swickards answer – more nuclear power please.
..and buy the way Swickard, if your radiation leak gets worse, ask those 20 million for their opinion on your cheeky headline.
As usual, Swickard speaks to none other than stone age right wing mentalities. Spare me.
You know, I don’t think anything gm has ever said in one of his disjointed ramblings has ever produced quite so much reaction – and incredulity – as those two bizarre little words…
A clever feat of Orwellian mind control that is a figment in the imaginations of it’s targets.
What the sam hell is a green bigot? Is that some Orwellian term hatched out some crazy Big Energy, agri-business right-wing think tank?
OK
Bigot – A Norman cuss word of insult meaning a person who holds blindly and intolerably to a particular creed, opinion or narrow-minded, prejudiced person.
Green- in this context is environmentalist or one who honors and seeks to conserve our natural heritage for future generations of most species especially our own.
Well, scientific knowledge about the natural world is more than just an opinion. It’s kinda like that Creationist museum where scientifically proven data is tossed out in lieu of magical thinking.
Cripes almighty! Why can’t the environmentalists come up with propagandistic terms like this especially designed to raise reptilian brain reaction to baseless derogatory discredit?
As Libertarian Liberal, I seldom think in terms of black and white but the arguments against Nuclear Energy are too stark and plain.
1. There exists no solution for radioactive waste disposal after spending billions on trying to figure it out. We could spend more billions and if we do figure it out, then let’s talk. Until then, Nuclear energy is not a viable option literally. Black and white.
2. The disaster in Japan is ongoing and we still don’t know how far it’s going to go. It is possible that the entire nation of Japan is actually in jeopardy. Jeopardy as in killed, dead, extinct, the whole Island. There is radioactive fallout coming our way and it will likely circle the globe contaminating everything it touches long term. It has been empirically proven beyond any argument or doubt that nuclear energy is unsafe, dangerous, lethal and impossible to control sooner or later. Entropy happens.
No. 2 nixes no. 1. Black and White. Game over. Stop, just stop. Short term greed does not get to win this time. Come radioactive muerde pinche pendejos.
signed,
PROUD GREEN BIGOT FOREVER, qofdisks
gm
Sorry, but you have no idea of what it means to respectfully disagree with anyone or anything. No one who meant to be respectful would use pejorative labels like “green bigots.” Suppose someone claimed to address you respectfully as a “bonehead engineer”; would you htink them respectful? Doubt it.
Despite your claim to be an engineer, you appear to know little about the failures of engineering recognized at the time by other engineers. The early light-water reactors had vigorous qualified critics when they were first designed, proposed, and built. So get off the silly opposition between engineers and environmentalists.
In my consulting experience in energy and environment, I knew people accomplished in both fields, and they were fully capable of thinking in terms of trade-offs between technical, management, environmental, and economic factors. And everyone in Washington knew that these considerations often did not translate into wise political decisions because they were often skewed by the clout of special interests, some of them engineering firms like Halliburton.
Dr. Swickard: For every wind farm there must be a traditional source of power standing by for when the wind stops. Wind and solar as a mainstream energy source do not make energy sense.
There are two key innovations which are not yet completely in effect for a seamless transition into green power to occur:
1) Something that replaces the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine to allow cars and trucks to transport goods and people around the country without having to stop every 200 miles for more electricity from an outlet
2) Something that is able to store the vast amounts of energy which we could harvest from solar, wind, and hydro sources.
The claim that ‘solar as an energy source makes no energy sense’ is hyperbolic and flat-out wrong. …I mean unless you think that Earth’s couple quadrillion photosynthetic organisms get their energy from burning coal. The sun supplies 3,850,000 exajoules to the Earth every year. Human civilization uses about 500 exajoules a year. So if we harnessed one thousandth of the energy that the sun provides to the Earth, we’d be able to power 7 human civilizations.
gm: Finally, if global warming is for real, let’s divert all the billions we are spending on research on that issue and build windmills…..Let’s see how loud the warming researchers scream that it really isn’t a done deal and we need to look at it further…
My first response is snarky: If cancer is for real, let’s divert all the billions we are spending on researching on that issue and just build hospitals with devoted cancer wards. I mean what’s the point of researching something once we’ve proved it exists?
My second response is less snarky: actually the President of the US and Congress, back in 2009, passed legislation which did want to invest money into building a green energy infrastructure in the US. That funding is now being set up for cutting by the GOP-run House, since apparently we can just run on petroleum forever. …even though it’s a finite resource.
What exactly is a “green bigot”? Who is the class of people being marginalized by their actions?
Also, to say that energy independence is impossible shows a remarkable lack of knowledge about the subject. It isn’t even really impractical.
I would respectfully disagree that we have no vision…..It may be that we have too many visions that conflict….We have the highly imaginary and theoretical view of the green bigots and the real world of the energy providers……As for bad designs, as an engineer I can safely say that designs evolve, improve, change……It is unrealistic to expect a 60-y old reactor to be what we would design today……Same goes for cars, machines, etc……..
Alternative energy or energy independence are myths…….The amount of energy required for an industrialized nation can only be provided by fossil fuels and nuclear. Supplement with bio, wind, solar?…Yes…..But the bulk has to come from fossil…..
Finally, if global warming is for real, let’s divert all the billions we are spending on research on that issue and build windmills…..Let’s see how loud the warming researchers scream that it really isn’t a done deal and we need to look at it further…….
Michael L. Hays, if I weren’t Queer, I’d kiss you on the mouth! It’s ok, Heath, it’s not a slur, the way I’m using it.
Wikipedia: Queer Theory
darn shame, when you can’t make a joke without explaining it.
Correction: I meant to say seventeen million people, not seventeen thousand.
The lack of energy policy reflects one simple fact: we have taken the politically convenient way of concurring with fossil-fuel contributors to re-election campaigns. A sure sign of their political clout is the enormous wealth transfers from our taxes to the corporate treasuries of the fossil-fuel industries. Th effect is that established industries get tax dollars to suppress costs below the market-entry cost of alternatives. The “green’ movement of your fantasies has never had real political power or much in the way of federal support, only a megaphone. At least there is some talk of ending support for the fossil-fuel industries and shifting it to alternatives. That shift may be necessary, but any new arrangements should come with sunset provisions, or the country will continue its really big energy problem: hiding the true cost of energy and thereby encouraging bad corporate investment decisions and bad consumer purchasing decisions. A truly free energy market–one without subsidies, etc.–is what the country needs.
Because of a concern with global warming, many “greens” are supporting nuclear power. The problem is an old regime which has richly deserved its lousy reputation for safe technologies and competent management. The “greens” have been right about the deficiencies of this current nuclear power regime–which is why the second regime is still waiting in the wings. The government and the industry, working together, have destroyed their credibility, and it will be very difficult to get it back, especially if the Swickards of the world try to make environmentalists responsible for a failed nuclear power regime made possible by engineering hubris, corporate greed, and political corruption.
“The closest to an energy policy this nation has found is really an anti-energy policy pushed by the “green” political agenda. Not only is this not an energy policy, it has no real standing because “green” technologies rely upon traditional energy sources for validity. For every wind farm there must be a traditional source of power standing by for when the wind stops. Wind and solar as a mainstream energy source do not make energy sense.”
You answered your own question, in part, about wind, as solar can supplement, as can geothermal and a good number of alternatives, besides. The days of energy monopolies and public hostage-taking by ONE source of power per community are over. We need to develop cooperative, not competitive, capitalism, for this to happen. That is why mouth pieces for existing corporations come up with these outlandish and outdated statements like yours. If monopolies hadn’t stifled free market capitalism in the early 1900s, who knows how much further advanced we would be in battery storage, wireless energy transmission, etc? Remember: it was oil companies’ corrupt influence on Los Angeles politics that lead to the ripping up of the Red Cars in the mid 20th century. And there’s that paranoid word, “agenda,” again. Yours is a political agenda; why is it wrong for others to have them, as well? Is it because, in your short-sighted apologia for antiquated and outmoded corporations’ dominance, you can’t possibly see the opportunities for many free market industries that don’t involve brown, grey and black politics, environmentally speaking?
The overall lesson in Japan, though, is being missed by most people. While it is appropriate to have some concern about the nuclear power generation,
The overall lesson that is missed about Japan, sir, is that more than 17,000 people’s lives and health are in imminent jeopardy as a result of this catastrophe, on top of all who died and were maimed in the NATURAL catastrophes that proceeded them. It is MORE than appropriate to have a great deal of “concern” about an outmoded form of energy that produces waste that is highly toxic for very many years. In fact, the entirety of humanity ought be outraged that so many lives are at risk for profit.
The Japanese are tremendous innovators and they are, culturally, homogeneous. They are tremendously hard workers, do not whine, work for the community good. THEY will find a solution, for all of us, out of the morass of dinosaur thinking about capitalism, competition vs. cooperation, monopoly vs. collectivity. They will show us the way past a system that is outmoded and impedes human progress, a system which you so weakly defend.
“When Americans talk about energy policy, we are blind. Worse than blind, stupid. Worse than blind and stupid, intentionally so.”
I couldn’t agree more. The fact that the first electric and steam-powered automobiles, created at the same time as the internal combustion engine, withered on the vine is testimony to the corporate interests of the oil industry. Had they been allowed free market to develop, we might have a very different scenario today, sans oil, coal and uranium, which are killing us.
“conniption”
Definition of CONNIPTION: a fit of rage, hysteria, or alarm What a condescending way to depict legitimate fears of the Japanese people that they will be exposed to lethal radiation!
“First, it made the Japanese prey to people who are trying to use an anti-nuclear agenda rather than deal with Japan’s problems.” [emphasis mine]
What sort of conspiracy theory is this? Why is it, when one disagrees with “conservatives” (who actually conserve very little and squander very much), one is accused of an “agenda,” as though one has been plotting a secret, underground userpation of the nation (“Gay agenda, Socialist agenda, feminist agenda, anti-whatever-you-are-in-favor-of agenda”)? Have you attended these clandestine cells, or are these the wild fantasies of one too insecure in his own position to permit the courtesy of allowing an ideological opponent to clearly speak his or hers, lest you actually learn something?