HeyBub wrote:

David Nebenzahl wrote:


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.




Nuclear power, on its own, is clean, cheap, and reliable. It's certainly
clean - the only thing it emits is heat. Building a nuclear power plant is
relatively cheap - it can cost on the same order as a coal-fired plant.

What makes the cost so bizarre is the anti-nuclear movement! Fifteen years
of litigation, design changes ten times the requirements of engineering best
practices, abundant political machinations, all contribute to the bill. Who
needs the grief?




Have they settled the fight over where to bury nuclear waste? How soon
we forget.

With all of the zillions and zillions of dollars in bail-out money they
should insulate homes. Hire
out-of-work trades to do basic energy audits, beginning with the homes
of least value on the tax
rolls. Hire others to blow in insulation, caulk, slap some fiberglass
down in the attics. Mebbe repair
some roofs. Goal: keep people employed, reduce energy consumption, help
low-income (low-income,
in my book, is someone with not enough money to pay the bills) folks
afford to live in their homes,
give property value a nudge upward.

Using energy at our present level is never going to be "green" - not
windmills, not nuclear, not
"clean" coal. THAT is an oxymoron. Y'all want to check out the sunset
on the coast through
a mass of windmills?

If GM is going south, the gov't should buy it, convert plants to mfg.
solar panels and give 'em
away. Lot of sunshine where I live. Could probably export electricity.