Posted on 06/22/2005 9:56:33 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
"There is a growing consensus that more nuclear power will lead to a cleaner and safer nation," President Bush said on Wednesday during a trip to a nuclear power plant in Maryland.
"It is time for this country to start building nuclear power plants again," he said to applause at the Calvert Cliffs plant.
"We're taking practical steps to encourage construction of new plants, Bush said, as he pressed Congress to send him an energy bill by August.
President Bush joked that he didn't understand all the buttons and dials in the control room of the Calvert Cliffs plant -- but he said he does know that when the people of Maryland flip a switch and see their lights come on, they need to thank the people working at the nuclear plant.
He said nuclear power is the one energy source that is "completely domestic, plentiful in quantity, environmentally friendly, and able to generate massive amounts of electricity."
The 103 nuclear power plants currently operating in America produce about 20 percent of the nation's electricity, Bush noted, without producing a single pound of air pollution or greenhouse gases.
In terms of safety, times have changed since the 1970s, Bush said. Advances in technology have made nuclear plants far safer than they were before. Yet no new plants have been built in the U.S. since the 1970s.
In his speech, President Bush noted that Americans are using energy faster they they're producing it. "We really haven't confronted this problem," he said, noting that he's been asking Congress to send him an energy bill for the past four years. All he's gotten is debate and politics but no results, he said. "So now's the time...for Cognress to stop the debate, stop the inaction, and pass an energy bill."
The House has passed an energy bill and the Senate needs to do so, the president said -- before the Senate's August recess.
President Bush said gasoline prices will not drop when he signs a bill. But making the nation less dependent on foreign oil will make life better for future generations, he said.
I disagree.... When the US commits to an alternate form of energy for both electricity and transportation use, the price of oil will drop like a rock! And, I hope I live to see the day that the current Saudi prince has to drink his light sweet crude to stay alive........
Coal is cheaper, and also plentiful in the US.
What about the future?
Nuke power is clean and if the plants are built right and in out of the way places they can solve our energy problems for a long time until we figure out an even better way of producing power.
Absolutely true in the past when fear of a successful energy Manhattan project greatly decreasing the demand for oil kept the OPEC price down. They didn't want to encourage the U.S. to find an alternative.
However, it may be that OPEC knows about current successful energy research, like the research just published by UCLA on a successful experiment generating energy from cold fusion.
They may be out now to wring every last dime they can for their resource during the last few golden years of The Petroleum Age that they have left.
Plus there is also the growing demand for oil in China keeping pressure on the price.
We realized this long ago. Ask yourself why the liberals built them out of the country and not here?
Quit yer bragging. I don't even have an inverter, but I am wired for solar if I ever decide to do it.
The big question is can Bush cut down the regulations and bureaucracies which are stopping nuclear power. On terrorists we can use cruise missiles where we find them..
But on the government administrators holding the nation's energy supply hostage, it seems more difficult.
I'll miss you!
And more relevantly, because the Chernobyl design is nothing like the US standard pressurized-water design. The only Chernobyl-class reactors in the US are a few old federally-operated units that produce fuel for nuclear weapons.
Might I suggest an upgrade? You never know when we may need to "head for the hills" and it is always good to have all the comforts of home. ;*)
Exactly.. And there are many people in America who work INSIDE nuclear plants. Their life expectancy is slightly above the national average.
Thanks for the post. I too follow solar closely. It's a shame solar has the reputation that only liberals support its research. I'm afraid nuclear is pulling the rug out from under it again like it did back in the 80's. Perhaps as Japan shoots for 50% of all residential electrical demand being met by solar energy by 2030 (by which time we'll be scrambling for storage facilities for the tons of radioactive waste we've produced), some more conservatives will see that back-burnering solar research was not the smartest move we've ever made. I guess we'll see.
Yep - have several family and friends that can attest to that. They're doing better than most!
The great misconception about nuclear is that it "produces waste". It can't, unless you believe that energy springs magically out of nothing. Natural uranium has a half-life of roughly a billion years. When we 'burn' it in reactors, we are using up a fraction of the energy it contains, leaving behind a mixture of unburned uranium and a transmuted mxture of breakdown product elements. Meany of these breakdown products are more stromngly radioactive than the original uranium, bt only because their half-lives are so mch shorter. Radioactive iodine decays away in a matter of weeks, for example. There is no way the total energy in nuclear waste can exceed the energy in the uranium you started with.
When nuclear waste is recycled, as at Tsukuba and Cap-La-Hague, these elements are separated. Unburned uranium is used to make new fuel rods; plutonium can be burned to create still more energy in specially designed reactors; short half-life elements are simply allowed to decay away quickly. Some of the intermediate-term elements have medical uses.
America could recycle too, but right now the process is expensive. Since we have the large stable deserts that Japan and France don't, we find it more efficient to store nuclear waste until recycling, like all technologies, gets cheaper.
But let's adopt a standadized design first. The problem with our first generation of plants is that every reactor was individually designed and built. If cars were designed and manufactured that way, who could afford one?
OTOH, as far as I know nobody has rescinded Jimma Cartah's directive prohibiting nuclear waste recycling which would end the nuclear waste problem but for plutonium.
Build them in Mexico !
It's also very dirty, both to mine and to burn. It even releases more radioactive waste than nuclear does, and unlike in nuclear plants this stuff is not concentrated and collected - it just wafts away into the air, into your lungs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.