Posted on 08/27/2008 8:22:17 AM PDT by kellynla
Energy. It's the stuff of which our world and universe are made. It is everything we can perceive and measure in the physical world. Beyond that physical world, we "see through a glass, darkly." Science, engineering and the industries that are based upon them deal solely with energy – its nature and its uses.
We utilize many forms of energy – gravitational energy, such as that in hydroelectric dams; kinetic energy, as stored in a flywheel or the wind; heat energy, as in a geothermal well; elastic energy, as in a rubber band; electrical energy, as carried in power lines; chemical energy, as in gasoline; radiant energy, as in sunshine; nuclear energy, as utilized by nuclear power plants; and mass energy, as material objects – mass – are just another form of energy with the quantity measured by E=mc2.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
I happen to have a nuke plant a few minutes drive from my home, and I don't have a problem with that
The reason we have a nuke waste issue is because Jimmy Carter banned recycling of nuke waste. Otherwise we could reprocess spent fuel rods, extract the plutonium, and make new fuel rods. We need to overturn the Executive Order and resume recycling of nuke fuel
“do you want a nuke in your backyard?”
I did for years.
I used to live in San Clemente.
and “no, I don’t glow in the dark from it.” LOL
“what do we do with the leftovers (nuke waste)? Just asking.”
read the article, the author addresses that issue...
and then read up on what the French do...
One would think it was obvious.
All this stuff was taken past the "design concept" into working plants LONG ago--fuel reprocessing, fuel design, breeder reactors, you name it. And in virtually every case, the working prototypes were shut down due to eco-nutcase anti-nuke propaganda/hysteria, which, btw, was started and funded by the KGB. And it is propagated today by "useful idiots", who THINK they know something about the subject, when, in actual fact, they know very little.
Bottom line:”There is only one simple central question in the energy debate:As their suffering increases will the American people realize their diminishing prosperity is the direct result of taxation,regulation and litigation their government has created?”I’m counting on it.I believe we(Americans)will not act unless conditions become intolerable.Too many Americans are apathetic and/or oblivious to what is going on.I expect social/economic conditions to progresively deteriorate(with or without a republican/rino in the whitehouse).Simply a matter of time.Lock-n-load!
>>I did for years.
>>I used to live in San Clemente.
Spent many hours surfing the Most Excellent point break that results from the sandbar which forms on top of the submerged cooling tubes. ;-)
Not to be condescending, but how about some deregulation of banking and lending so the poor and credit challenged can borrow trillions. Most regulations have a purpose not apparent today because they actually worked, a few are nonsense to some, but important to others Im sure.
Saying wall to wall deregulation is the answer is a lie and would likely degrade our quality of life.
Since my area of study is national security and not energy, basically I have opinions and not incites. However, other countries like France provide most of their basic national power grid through nuclear power, so they would seem to have a solution. I am guessing that the problem with waste in this country derives in large part from environmentalist roadblocks that have little to do with safety.
Robinson gives Jimmy Carter's anti-proliferation ban as the reason that we are not recycling waste, but the real rationale is economics: with current technology, recycling the waste costs more than mining American uranium, so there is no reason for us to rush into it. If we store the waste in one of the many safe laces we have, it will be there as a minable resource when and if the price of new uranium goes up. Japan and France have no choice but to recycle now because they have no safe place to store it.
The other part of the argument is that waste recycling, like all other technology, can be expected to get cheaper with time. What recycling does is recover the plutonium and unburned uranium, which constitute over 90% of the waste and are the very elements that keep it hot for thousands of years. The uranium and plutonium are fed back into the fuel cycle to produce still more energy, while the remaining stuff decays to be less radioactive than its environment in about 200 years. Meanwhile, there is always the possibility that some use will arise for those other isotopes.
I don't agree that we have diminishing prosperity, just diminished growth caused by new taxes and regulation. The average American continues to live longer, has more and better quality food, shelter, and entertainment choices than ever. It is increasing prosperity that has allowed the growth of big government.
War is great from the perspective of new technology. Computers, nuclear power, jet travel, microwave ovens, on and on, all came from forced technology investments for WWII. If it wasn't for WWII the money would have been wasted on social spending. It is very likely it will be our military spending that drives the invention of a petroleum replacement, masters climate control with man-made cloud creation, used initially as a weather weapon, and develops the initial robot workers of the future that will lead to another 50 years of American prosperity.
What McCain needs to do to solve the waste logjam is to commit to an industry mandate to build a Tsukuba-class recycling facility within a time certain, such as 50 years. If nuclear recycling gets cheaper during that time, as most technologies do, all the better. If it doesn't, we would in no way be paying more than we would now by recycling.
Our lack of specific commitment to a recycling facility is what leads the public to believe, totally falsely, that nuclear waste is some sort of mammoth unsolved problem hanging over our heads. It also leads to the also totally false perception that nuclear waste is something that has to be "dumped." The laws of physics are no different in Japan, and all waste of any kind can be recycled if we're wiling to pay the price.
"the reason we can't reprocess the waste is that the President of the United States won't rescind an Executive Order. The reason for the order has nothing to do with technology or safety; it's about who gets to make money. The holders of treasury bonds [OPEC] need a reason to buy them with the Fed inflating the currency and this is how our government delivers to those bond holders while hiding the inflation from the public."
“The energy issue is actually an issue of human rights. Each human being has a fundamental human right to the freedom required to produce or acquire the energy and technology necessary to provide him and those he is responsible for with as long, prosperous, healthful and enjoyable lives as his resourcefulness and labor can produce – so long as his efforts do not encroach upon these same human rights of his fellow men. Restriction of these human rights to freely produce is morally and ethically wrong. It is a form of slavery.”
That, (”so long as his efforts do not encroach upon these same human rights of his fellow men”) is exactly what we’re constantly fighting over.
Driving a car pollutes the air so it encroaches on other’s people right to breathe clean air. Nuclear produces radioactive waste which has got to be stored with possible danger of radioactive release. Drilling in ANWR “destroys” the pristiness of a region which “insults’ certain people’s sensibilities. Smoking pollutes the local air which other people breathe, which they may not want to breathe. Someone expressing his opinion about certain subjects may be deemed as hateful by certain people. Your perfume makes me sick, so I don’t want you to wear it.
So how do we limit the “as long as it doesn’t encroach on my rights” restriction so that it’s a ball-and-chain on what we can do and say??
They built a nuke next to my hometown.
What to do with the waste? Read the article. Reprocess it. Breeder reactors. As has been noted on FR many times, the final waster is pretty small.
Thanks for the direction to the post. With my interest in national security, anyone who can quote the Federalist Papers has got to be worth reading.
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