One hates to advocate government getting into business, but since Bush, business
has been running government, anyway. But we need a controlled, defined design,
with qualified operators, like you guys have been discussing. After all, how
many nuke plants does the US Navy operate, with very few (admitted) incidents?
And coal and oil fired plants have their own death rates - check the labor
department about the number of coal mine deaths per year. More than Three Mile
Island....and an industrial death is still a death, whatever the cause. And,
you want to talk about radiation hazards and long term effects, check a coal
miner with silicosis. And we have them by the tens of thousands.
George McKinney
>Can't figure to this day why there aren't CANDUs running and under
>construction in the US.
Nuclear power is dead in this country. There's probably a need, but no
demand. People just don't trust the energy business any more and in
particular they don't trust the nuclear power business. That's the
function of leadership--to inspire trust in a course of action, and there
isn't any leadership in that area. US industry likes financial people,
not technical leaders like Henry Kaiser or Rickover or Werner von Braun.
That's bad enough, but the conniving from Enron and deep suspicions of
big oil have destroyed much of what credibility remains. Congress and the
executive branch are scared of them. When you add serious pollution
concerns to the mix and it's a mess, that will probably require a
catastrophe to get straightened out.
We've had since 1973 to make ourselves energy independent, and we just
pissed it away, by not taking steps to reduce our dependence on petroleum
and other fossil fuels, by not emphasizing cleaner power and more
efficient automobiles, by not taking serious steps to make nuclear energy
economical and by ignoring all but the stupidest possible approach to
disposing of spent nuclear fuel. Despite all the free market ideology,
these are not the kinds of issues you can expect corporate America to
address, especially the corporate America whis has given us Ken Lay and
Roger Smith and seems hell bent on destroying our manufacturing base.
Without turning this into a political discussion, I take the
Ford-Reagan-Bush (both) preoccupation with rolling back the clock as the
major problem. Not that the Dems did much, but the Pubs were in office
during the years when they could have made a difference without draconian
measures. Much as I admire Jimmy Carter, I don't think he had the starch
to head up the kind of energy policy reassessment that could have done
the job in the late 70's. Clinton had the brains and drive to do it but
as pre-occupied as he was he missed the chance. We Americans only stop
wasting time when someone sticks a gun in our ear, so I expect that we'll
only get a serious approach to energy policy when it's almost too late,
the price is almost intolerable, and there's someone with FDR's (or
cousin Theodore Roosevelt) leadership skills to galvanize national will.
Christopher Wright P.E. |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com | this distance" (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)
<a href="http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw">http://www.skypoint.com/~chrisw</a>
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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Received on Mon Apr 05 13:37:00 2004
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