On 12/4/2008 6:24 AM HeyBub spake thus:

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?

You must have missed what I wrote. You give the antinuclear movement far
too much credit for the moratorium on building nukes in this country
(U.S.). Look at the economics. Keep in mind that we (the anti-nukes)
were fighting the NRC just as hard as we were fighting the utilities:
the feds hardly changed their policies one inch as a result of all our
agitation, so you can't lay the problem at the doorstep of "excessive
regulation". The NRC has always been somewhat of a lapdog that obeys its
real masters, the electric utilities and nuclear power plant
construction firms (GE, Bechtel, Combustion Engineering, etc.).

All of which completely ignores the 900-lb. gorilla here, which is the
ongoing problem of radioactive waste disposal which is still not even
close to being solved, let alone even temporarily. This should be enough
to permanently nail that particular coffin closed and bury it.

Like we used to say: who needs fission reactors on earth, when we have a
perfectly good, inexhaustible *fusion* reactor out there in space?


--
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