On 12/3/2008 8:25 PM scorpster spake thus:

I just received a notice from California Edison that Tier 3, 4 and 5 rates
are increasing AGAIN in the first quarter of 2009. My electric bill is
typically $400 a month. I don't think very many people fall into Tier 1 or
2. Here's what really ****es me off: the electric utilities fail to take
advantage of clean nuclear power. They keep wasting our money on natural
gas, wind power, and all kinds of inefficient "green" ideas but they are
blind to nuclear power. If we had nuclear power we'd only be paying a
fraction of the price and it would be good for the environment!!

As a former card-carrying anti-nuclear activist, I'm here to tell you
that "clean, cheap, reliable nuclear power" always is and still is total
bull****. (Don't know if you remember back that far, but they used to
talk about nuclear electricity rates "too cheap to meter". Hah.)

And people like me can take pretty much *zero* credit for stopping
nuclear power in its tracks, back in the 1980s; it was mostly the
terrible economics of the technology that did it in.

Regardless of the spin you hear from the nuke industry in the US,
countries all over the world are getting out of nuclear as fast as they
can. (Exceptions, of course, for North Korea, Iran, etc.)

Distributed and multi-source "green" power is and will be the way to go.
(Plus conservation and increased energy efficiency. Like Amory Lovins
used to say, paraphrased, "If you have a bathtub with no drain plug, you
can either try to build a bigger nuclear-powered source of water to keep
it filled, or you can get a damn drainplug and put it in.")


--
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

- Paulo Freire