Free Republic

The Swedish government remains committed to phasing out nuclear power but the process will take at least twenty years, minister for sustainability, with responsibility for energy policy, Mona Sahlin told employees at the Ringhals nuclear plant on Wednesday. Sahlin spoke at the invitation of a union umbrella group representing plant workers. She called uranium "a finite resource, which means that nuclear is not sustainable." Sahlin said that by developing renewable energy sources and promoting energy conservation, Sweden can phase out nuclear power.

Bradley C. Edwards, president and founder of Carbon Designs Inc., is the driving force behind the space elevator, a purportedly safer and cheaper form of transporting explorers and payloads into space. Although the idea has appeared in both technical and fictional literature for decades, the drive to bring it to reality belongs to Edwards. A cable extending from the Earth’s surface to outer space is kept under tension by the competing forces of gravity on Earth and the outward rotational acceleration of the planet in space. Once the cable is aloft, the elevator will be ascended by mechanical means.

Has anyone else ever visited this site? It has collected all the stupidly outrageous things various liberal celebrities, pundits, and politicians have said over the past few years. I spent hours this weekend poring through all the stuff.

(CNSNews.com) - According to several new studies on mercury levels in the United States, any reduction of such emissions at American power plants would have minimal impact since the factories currently produce less than 1 percent of the total mercury that ends up in our air, land and water.........

This is an excellent website featuring Wes Oleszewski's great cartoons lampooning aviation, NASA, the FAA, airline companies, and Mayor Daley (or Snorkey as Wes calls him). He has a generally conservative bent and a rapier wit to go with a wickedly warped sense of humor. I heard about this website from a model rocketry discussion board and spent hours going through a huge backlog of his cartoons posted on the site. WARNING: A lot of the humor requires a good general knowledge of aviation and space topics to be really funny. Some require only a general contempt of bureaucracy.

SAN FRANCISCO -- An unusually smooth and swiftly growing lava dome within the crater of Washington state's Mount St. Helens volcano is an extraordinary and perplexing event with an unknown outcome, geologists said Tuesday. When Mount St. Helens blew its top in 1980, it left a mile-wide crater. Over the next six years, a dome of lava built up in the middle of the crater. Then the volcano went quiet. The dome became partly buried by a glacier that's more than 600 feet deep in places. Read rest at : http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/041215_msh_update.html