It looks like Obama's budget intends to give up on implementing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository. (Congratulations, Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-NV).
So, nuclear waste would continue to sit around nuclear power plants. Which means nobody is going to build anymore nuclear power plants in the U.S. ever. And since we'll be cutting back on carbon emissions, that will leave, uh, wind and solar power. And don't forget tidal power. Or maybe photosynthesizing bacteria.
Factor that into your long range economic growth projections, then see where the Dow should be.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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37 comments:
Well, liberals like environmentalism and infrastructure, but then NIMBY it to hell and back. What else is new?
This is ridiculous unscientific BS. We are really going to need Kurzweilian technological progress to to keep growth strong.
Disgusting.
God this guy think's he's immune.
He has been.
There's a breaking point.
What do you expect? The left was never about clean, cheap power. Liberals now want to tax people for driving because gas prices and the economic downturn have people driving less, using more fuel efficient vehicles and alternative fuels. Punished for doing what liberals want.
Killing nuclear power is the dumbest thing Obama could do. Barring some unforeseen breakthrough, it's our only hope for energy independence.
Obama is a disaster.
Nuclear? Democrats say no.
Oil? Democrats say no.
Coal? Democrats say no.
Do they have a realistic "third way?" No.
SWPL liberals and minorities live in smallish apartments/condos in big cities with mass transit. The wrong kind of whites live out in the burbs and exurbs with big houses that need to be heated and cooled. The point of all this is just to punish whites who live in nice houses and drive places. If I weren't white I could call it "geographic racism."
One of these days the petroleum spigot will be shut off, maybe because of Peak Oil or more likely due to some damn fool thing in the Middle East. The resultant prospect of freezing to death in the dark will concentrate our minds wonderfully, and nuclear power will make a comeback.
if none of this works out, maybe the government can just tax welfare checks.
Faster, please.
Obama's making so many mistakes that there's absolutely no doubt things will be worse come 2012, and he'll get booted from office. If not, then we on the right are wrong about everything and there's nothing to worry about.
So what is Obama's real goal? Is he trying to make American assets so cheap that the rest of the world will scoop us up for pennies on the dollar, and we spend the rest of our days laboring for our foreign masters?
Is that even plausible? Because it's the only thing that explains his actions in a rational way.
On top of Obama's insanity we have the attempts by our august senators to expand immigration at a time of rising unemployment.
And add to Obama's insanity that of the British Labour Party:
Minority groups to get extra government help during recession. The Labour Minister refers to the early 90s "Tory recession" and "the families where no one then worked for generations." Yes, the "generations" between 1992 and 2009.
Scottish police to place extra emphasis on crimes with Muslim victims.
British Muslims justify terrorism by saying British foreign policy offends them. Muslim population up 50%, from 1.6 mil to 2.4 mil, since 2001.
4,000 British Muslims fighting British troops in Afghanistan.
There really is no making this shit up. A guy writing a screenplay for a dystopian nightmare wouldn't think it realistic.
So what's their deal? Are they trying to see how much they can get away with? Have they been bought off by Mideast oil money? Have they figured out how to rig the elections?
Tarring and feathering needs to make a comeback and quick. We peasants need to take up our pitchforks.
The buying of cheap US and European assets is real and it is coming, fast. Rumor is that China will buy Volvo from Ford (and on the cheap) and maybe other car makers. The shell company that will be used to buy Volvo is a tiny car or car parts maker. So make no mistake, it is a front for the Chinese government. But that is just the start; China has a sovereign wealth fund with up to $500 billion ($500,000,000,000) for starters ready to ramp up buying overseas assets.
European peoples are going to be worse off then were the former colonial peoples. I can’t see how it is going to be avoided. An resistance, political or otherwise is likely to be smacked down with a fury by the overlords of the new global order (with Europeans at the bottom).
Ha ha ha, I never thought the US would end up in such a dead-end. Germany is poised to break out of that self-imposed exile in the next election cycle. The nuclear industry here is poised, waiting for the winds of change. Even Greens here now acknowledge that windmills are not going to cut it. And that solar is too expensive. The environmental ministry, which is the last outpost of Green ideology, recently cut subsidies of bio-fuel reactors, which means many will go bust. And the boss of Greenpeace thinks nuclear is a viable option.
Hydrogen will remain a niche item for hydrogen-powered U-boats, satellites, the next generation Apollo program etc. All the scientists agree that the best way to get off the Saudi teat is nuclear coupled with electrical cars. And the German industry is gearing up for that sea change.
Now what has happened to the US? I never thought they would be so stupid.
"God this guy think's he's immune.
He has been.
There's a breaking point."
Dream on. Show me the breaking point of Mugabe?
You need to get James Lovelock, he of the GAIA hypothesis, over your side of the pond. He's such a global warming doom-monger that he supports the renewed use of nuclear power as a major energy source.
Do you think power is in the hands of those who have seen his Long Form birth certificate?
We truly do need nuclear energy, here is why true leftists are against it:
The global warming scam is intended to make the United States pay for carbon credits for every bit of CO2 it puts into the atmosphere. The scam wants you to be taxed personally for your "carbon footprint". If we build a ton of nuclear plants, drive plug-hybrids, put windmills on every telephone poll and one eight foot solar dish right beside the TV dish on our roofs.............we wont be burning much fossil fuels, and hence our "carbon footprint" will be very small, robbing the globalists of the tax they wish to impose upon America to act as a governor on her economic engine.
THEY DONT WANT AMERICA TO GO "GREEN", they wish to tax her silly, and to continue to be able to tell her, "you are ruining the world".
Feel the cold snap lately, how cool the past couple of years have been? If you think you hate it, the internationale' left really hates it because its invalidating global warming (its gotta start happening sometime right? I mean hell, weve been hearing about it since the 90's and its almost 2010 and its still getting cooler by the year), the moral cudgel they plan to beat us with as an excuse to tax us relentlessly.
As one commenter has pointed out, swipples are so shallow as to simply be for these things because it hurts all those bad "other" white people who aren't helping them pump up their own home values and gentrify the cities by living downtown.
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Palin's statement that "starting in January ... will be building nuclear power stations" was the single thing she said that made me believe she is what America needed. She understood & was willing to say something which, at the very least, most voters would rather not consider.
And had she had the chance to do so the confidence that recovery was on the way (which is half of getting recovery) would have been achieved by now.
Ah well - 4 years isn't that long a sentence.
Killing nuclear power is the dumbest thing Obama could do. Barring some unforeseen breakthrough, it's our only hope for energy independence.
The catch phrase "energy independence" give "diversity" a run for its money in silliness. We don't want energy independence, we don't need energy independence, and we aren't aiming toward energy independence. We have no natural enemies in the world, just a vast excess of people who want to immigrate to America. So trading with energy producers has never been a problem and never will be unless we create a problem ourselves.
If we assume the recent Iraq war was fought partly over oil rather than merely making Iraq democratic & that the previous one was done almost entirely over oil rather than to make Kuwait democratic not being dependent on these countries has advantages.
"...come 2012, and he'll get booted from office."
That would require some competent competition.
After the talking vaginas that make up the Republican party take another pounding in 2010 we'll hopefully get a real alternative from the resulting shake-out. I'm very pessimistic that it'll happen before then, and not exactly optimistic that it will happen afterwards.
SWPL liberals and minorities live in smallish apartments/condos in big cities with mass transit. The wrong kind of whites live out in the burbs and exurbs with big houses that need to be heated and cooled. The point of all this is just to punish whites who live in nice houses and drive places.
While the exurbs are not SWPL territory, it's not at all true that affluent liberal types only live in (fashionable) urban neighborhoods. In every big city, you'll find suburbs that are dominated by WhiterPeople. There are probably more of them living on Philadelphia's Main Line, for example, than downtown. And what about Westside LA? That's not urban in the way you mean, but it is very Whiter. The SWPL blog itself was about a small, young, urban segment of the much larger Whiter population.
What you're seeing is driven by economics as much as politics and lifestyle. People who can afford it will generally choose to have their principal home close to their place of work. That means, for most people, living in the city or in a close-in suburb. Since city life is not for everyone - not even SWPLs - affluent people will most often choose close-in but nice suburbs.
Since richer people tend also to have more SWPL tendencies (because, let's be honest, the SWPL way of life is pretty damn nice if you can afford to do it well), places like Bryn Mawr, PA, or Brentwood, CA, will naturally have more WhiterPeople than the poorer, further-out burbs.
I'm wondering way off topic, but the geography of liberal politics among the affluent deserves more exploration and would make a great Steve post. For example, here in Philadelphia, Obama won the entire Main Line and all the adjacent, slightly less affluent but still comfortable, suburbs. This includes both the older, closer-in suburbs and the newer McMansion townships. This is a major reversal of the politics of just a decade or so ago.
Perhaps the Yucca site is just too near Las Vegas?
Solution - build another one further away - make it part of yet another stimulus package. Anyone who has ever driven across Nevada has to know that God intended the region for hazardous waste disposal.
Besides, Nevada needs to diversify away from its main industries of gambling and whoring.
The Asians are going for nuclear power, including advanced designs that include on-site reprocessing of nuclear waste, in a big way. They also do not buy into the global warming scam like we do here. The result will be the complete outsourcing of all heavy manufacturing, including basic materials such as steel, concrete, and silicon, to China and the other Asian countries.
Perhaps Obama is the real "Manchurian" candidate in that he is secretly working for the Chinese. More likely, he is a "useful" idiot.
the US probably does not need 100% energy independence, but importing 14 million barrels of oil per day is a major problem. and with the way the population is growing, the US needs to build 2 new 500 megawatt coal power plants per year to meet electricity demand. knowing this, it is strange that secretary of energy chu is not very interested in nuclear.
nuclear fission reactors in 2010 are vastly different than they were in 1980. the difference is much larger than, say, the difference between cars from 1980 and cars from 2010. it's more like the difference between computers from 1980 and 2010.
france, japan, and finland are pretty nuclear. china will be fairly nuclear in 10 years. much of europe would be nuclear if germany and italy had not shut down their nuclear research and development in the 80s. germany was the leader in reactor design, and had a commercial thorium reactor in operation by 1983. using thorium solves the uranium supply problem.
if germany and the US had stayed in nuclear, working continously to improve nuclear power plants the way honda has worked on engines and intel has worked on CPUs for the last 30 years, today we could have 2 gigawatt power plants that operated on 2 tons of thorium per year instead of 20 tons of uranium.
then there's nuclear fusion, which the US fedgov is also not particularly interested in working on. it has allowed the lead on both fusion and supercollider physics to slip to europe.
Anyone who has ever driven across Nevada has to know that God intended the region for hazardous waste disposal.
LOL!
We don't have to dispose of the nuke fuel when we can simply reprocess it and use it again. Then we can have even more nukes on the same fuel supply.
Somewhat off topic, but Brentwood, California, is not a whiterpeople suburb. It's a NASCAR exurb in Contra Costa County full of working class whites and latinos who have seen their mortgages go underwater. (Back in November, 40% of its mortgages were underwater.)
The other Brentwood is a neighborhood of Los Angeles. It's not some semi-independent suburb, it's Los Angeles, just like Van Nuys and San Pedro and Hollywood and Chatsworth. It's just that people who live in that neighborhood are too embarrased to admit that they live in Los Angeles, so they call it Brentwood.
If we want zero CO2 coal we can get it cheap by running the smoke through a greenhouse.
Every so often there'd be a pile of Martian sawgrass to take to the landfill, but that's it.
Less-than-zero CO2 -that is, actively producing more clean air from the greenhouses, say blown into a deserving smoggy downtown area- would cost more. But it's doable too.
Will the Democrats do it? No. Their skill set consists of orthodoxy-sniffing. Are you a GOOD environmentally-concerned person? Actions taken from outside that skill set are a sign that you have failed to focus on being orthodox; you heretic.
Maybe the pot people? 'High Times' has some cutting-edge greenhouse tech.
Airtommy hit the nail on the head. "Energy Independence" is used to justify all sorts of pork in my home State of Connecticut, as if it will make Arabs and Persians quake in their boots when we put up a hideously expensive fuel cell or solar panel.
You can't pin this all on "liberals" or Obama - Republicans haven't exactly been too pro-nuclear power for a long time. Bush had unlimited political capital after 9/11, but did he push for building any new nuclear power plants to reduce our energy dependence on foreign countries?
"jody said...
if germany and the US had stayed in nuclear, working continously to improve nuclear power plants the way honda has worked on engines and intel has worked on CPUs for the last 30 years, today we could have 2 gigawatt power plants that operated on 2 tons of thorium per year instead of 20 tons of uranium.
then there's nuclear fusion, which the US fedgov is also not particularly interested in working on. it has allowed the lead on both fusion and supercollider physics to slip to europe."
I agree - we could have much better reactors than we have today (and cheaper too), if we had been working on improving them. The thorium fuel cycle, as you point out, is especially attractive. The required research and development however has been virtually impossible in this country - what company wants to spend millions to develop a reactor that no utility would buy anyway given the stifling regulatory and legal environment that environmentalists have given us.
I don't share your optimism about fusion however. 58 years of research in controlled fusion has left us with little that can even plausibly be extrapolated to a functioning reactor. And Europe isn't ahead of us in fusion - it's just that they have (or will have) ITER - which will be a collosal waste of money. No one but people who work on tokamaks think that a tokamak would make a viable reactor.
As I understand it, the nuclear waste problem would largely go away if spent fuel reprocessing was allowed. Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter (The naval nuclear engineer) issued an executive order that prohibits any domestic reprocessing and that order still stands. I think that fear of nuclear proliferation was the rational---a lot of good that did!
We in Georgia and South Carolina are willing and able to use the old nuclear bomb facilities to take care of the this problem.
(The naval nuclear engineer)
I smile every time I read this now. To think I only found out here, fairly recently, that "nuclear engineer" means "submarine pilot" in newspeak.
You can't pin this all on "liberals" or Obama - Republicans haven't exactly been too pro-nuclear power for a long time. Bush had unlimited political capital after 9/11, but did he push for building any new nuclear power plants to reduce our energy dependence on foreign countries?
Very true. I wonder why we can't find decent human beings to run this country.
People here always say they want smart people. I say give us 100 IQ leaders across the board, if that's what it takes to get decent people.
Airtommy lives in a fantasy world.
We do have enemies, just like a rich guy has enemies across town (poor people of a different skin color who would like his stuff). Absent force: military, police, the thugs across town or across the world can go take his stuff.
Technology allows even poor and disorganized groups the ability to do a lot of damage, in 1993 the poorly organized bombers came a lot closer than people imagine to toppling one tower onto another and killing 50,000 people. The goal of those plotters was not just to kill thousands of Americans for "stuff" but to make their organization rich and famous, as the jihadis who killed thousands of Americans. It's the only proven way for young, ambitious men in repressive tribal societies to move up to power, which is why we will see a lot of it.
Conservatives say "they hate us for our freedome" and liberals say "Why do they hate us?" and clueless isolationists say "we have no threat."
ALL are wrong. Energy independence won't have any impact one way or another on the desire of fractured tribal societies ambitious young men to kill lots of Westerners, particularly Americans, to build a large jihadi organization and exile Army. What's different now is that technology allows even disorganized groups like LeT to stage commando-like raids (the attack on the Sri Lankan Cricket team) at will with GPS, blackberries, Sat phones, and other gear allowing "close enough" type SEAL action to kill lots of people.
Nuclear power is probably worth doing because it provides lots of cheap electricity to power manufacturing, and is well suited to peak loads the way Solar, Wind, and the other Green junk is not.
Obama and his team are not very smart. They really are not. All they are really, are a bunch of speeches and teleprompters and corrupt cronies. That's it.
[Kudos to the observation of SWPL resentment. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy once said "What's the Point of being rich if ordinary people have nice things too?"
Energy independence won't have any impact one way or another on the desire of fractured tribal societies ambitious young men to kill lots of Westerners, particularly America
But it will give us more leeway in dealing with the petro kleptocracies that incubate these terrorist groups. Right now we don't dare say Boo! to Saudi Arabia. (Just as our being hopelessly in hock to China means we have less leverage when China starts shit. Think we'll dare say Boo! to China come the day it invades Taiwan or threatens Japan?).
Besides, if we can become energy independent and get other oil-dependent countries to do the same, we can cut off the megabucks that keep those shitty little terror-exporting Middle Eastern regimes alive.
Conservatives say "they hate us for our freedome" and liberals say "Why do they hate us?" and clueless isolationists say "we have no threat."
ALL are wrong.
If I had set immigration policy in, say, 1990, 9/11 would've been prevented.
True or False?
"if none of this works out, maybe the government can just tax welfare checks."
Don't tell me you Americans aren't taxes welfare handouts yet.
Get with the programme!
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