unico said:
Can you explain further why you think turning to nuclear energy is the best solution? I seriously dumped a guy this year because he believed the same thing (yes, I am that shallow.) I disagree wholeheartedly, but I admit that I am ignorant over the benefits. I only know of the risks...and that is a small amount of knowledge. It's okay though, he was a terrible kisser.
I have a lot of respect for you, and your posts here have really opened up my mind. So now I'm curious to know more about it.
Sure, but I should point out that I don't particularly believe that "respect" should be defined as agreeing with someone 100%. Admittedly, I even have some respect for some people whom I disagree with more than 50% of the time, but I feel contributes positively to the marketplace of ideas.
So with that, nuclear power is the cleanest, most stable, and most mature of the alternative energy technologies out there. Wind power, for instance, requires wind, which isn't always in our control. Solar power isn't very helpful for certain regions of the country that don't get much sun for good parts of the year. Hydroelectric? I shudder at the environmental degradation required to build a dam.
Nuclear? Like current conventional sources of power, it runs constant, no matter what the weather is like outside without all the related air pollution. In terms of nuclear waste, yes, we currently do have a lot of fission waste out there. Yet, much of this has to do with politics than actual science, as nuclear waste can be reprocessed into usable fuel again. Conventional science, however, states that reprocessing spent uranium rods yields a small amount of weapons grade plutonium, so, due to proliferation concerns, the U.S. has banned fuel reprocessing. Yet, Europe, at the same time, never agreed to this, and has been reprocessing its fuel for decades now, including up to today. All it would take is decent oversight to allay proliferation concerns, but even at that, substantial research has gone into creating a newer reprocessing technique that cannot create weapons-grade plutonium at all. As such, much of the concerns about waste have currently been dealt with.
As for nightmarish scenarios on par with Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, most credible scientists laugh off these concerns today. Chernobyl, in particular, was created with an older, inherently unstable reactor design--which was then, on top of it all, implemented poorly. These old reactor designs that created these mishaps are no longer in service, and the science dictates that these kinds of disasters just flat out cannot happen even at a theoretical level anymore. In other words, the fear of nuclear plant meltdowns isn't even warranted anymore. Compare this to coal power plants, which belch a lot of pollution into the air, and probably kill more people around the world indirectly than nuclear power has ever killed, due to the pollution potentially causing fatal diseases.
To me, there is idealism, and then there's the need to temper such idealism with pragmatism. I believe that we are fooling ourselves if we believe that we can get something for nothing. As such, we can either make the sacrifice of substantially reducing our economic output--which flies directly in the face of not only capitalism, but also human nature, which does not handle artificial constraints on freedom very well at all--or we can make such economic output environmentally friendly. Nuclear power is a proven, clean technology that has the best potential to replace not only fossil-fuel driven plants like coal and natural gas power plants, but also the power needed to generate the hydrogen fuel required to free us from oil and grant us energy independence. While solar and wind power are interesting from a theoretical POV, I doubt that either technology will ever provide the majority of the world's energy (a sizable minority, perhaps, and that's not a bad goal).
And, just to reiterate an old point of mine, I disagree with the idea of lumping on a large gas tax, which strikes me as a typically urban liberal response to this crisis (no offense to Irvine, who I quite respect). While some of us do have the luxury of reliable public transportation, a very sizable percentage of Americans (including myself) have no alternative but to drive. Besides, the current commodities-driven oil market, which allows both consumers (refineries) and speculators (investors) to buy into oil was created to prevent shortages from ever truly happening. These prolonged high oil prices are already serving the function of a theoretical "gas tax," as, although we are paying prices on par with the oil shortages of the 1970s, there are no current shortages to speak of. And these prices have driven an awful lot of investment in alternative energy companies, which is, again, precisely what capitalism was meant to drive.
Still, there is only so much that the free market can do on this issue, as much of the work seems rather random and of questionable direction, and so I feel that what we really need, at this point, is apt, visionary political leadership, which we have been sorely lacking in now for a very long time. Voting for those same candidates who pander only to "family values" and "tax cuts" are the exact wrong kind of candidates we need at this point in history. We've heard these same sorry lines now for nearly 30 years straight now, and it's gotten us absolutely nowhere and fast.