2008 candidates support nuclear energy to combat climate change.

2008 Candidates Show Affinity for Atomic Energy
By JOSH GERSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 20, 2007

In American politics, the rallying cry "No nukes!" seems to be losing its punch.

The crop of candidates seeking the White House in 2008 shows an affinity for atomic energy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

"You absolutely would not have gotten the same reaction not that long ago," a key anti-nuclear activist in California, Rochelle Becker, said.

Each of the top contenders for the Republican nomination and all but one of the major Democratic hopefuls support nuclear power to some extent. Most cite the prospect that atomic energy could help reduce climate change by supplanting power produced by fossil fuel sources such as coal and natural gas.

"The global warming issue is what is causing at least the Democratic candidates to say we need to leave nukes on the table," Ms. Becker, the executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, said.

The two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Clinton and Obama, have joined one of the top Republicans in the race, Senator McCain of Arizona, to sponsor the Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act of 2007. The measure includes more than $3.6 billion in funding and loan guarantees for the planning and construction of nuclear plants using new reactor designs.

http://www.nysun.com/article/52902

One more reason not to vote for Edwards...nothing less than the future of the planet is at stake.

Otherwise shut up about it.

Otherwise shut up about it.

I'm delighted the major Democratic candidates are turning to science and away from radical fringe elements of the Party on this issue.

It is not the long-term solution. but it can move us off of oil quickly as we develop new technologies, and will then free up our foreign policy with regards to the middle east, and ease prices at the pump.

It's amazing to me how many of the "no nuke" folks seem blind to the amount of "waste" coal-burning plants spew into the atmosphere. They seem to think the ony kind of waste is the nuclear kind.

poisons for future generations to deal with is NOT a solution.

That's right, let's switch to nuclear energy which produces waste we have no means of disposing of to combat global warming.

Fucking stupid.

plants ever did. Did you know it's not just global warming gases, but also cacinogenic substances being spewed into the air we breathe?

If you would rather have many times more coal burning plants than the number of nuclear energy plants it would take to replace them, then you are simply uneducated or a fool.

I just don't happen to think that nuclear waste is a reasonable alternative.

Wind and solar are unfeasibly expensive at the moment; they couldn't possibly provide the power required. Oil and natural gas have the same problems as coal, in addition to cost concerns. Biomass isn't likely compatible with our ethanol push long-term.

Putting funding in renewable energy is a good long-term solution, but doesn't do anything for the next 20-40 years.

methods of generation and storage.

Nuclear energy creates poison that CANNOT be disposed of safely. That the other candidates are supporting such an ultimately irresponsible source of energy doesn't do anything to engender my support.

25%, if we're willing to throw the economy into a tailspin. We'll have to do rolling blackouts to ensure we keep it there; this might have to occur for more than twenty years while we look into alternate methods of power generation. You've just launched a recession and the blackouts have ensured your party will go down to crushing defeat in the next election (see: Gov. Davis). But hey, sometimes you gotta take the good with the bad.

Hydro is already 10% of our supply; we can't bump that much more. We'll say we spend billions tomorrow and bump solar/wind (currently about 1% combined) to maybe 5%. Now, even with our massive restrictions on supply, rolling blackouts, and billions of dollars thrown at solar/wind, we have 60% of our power needs completely unfulfilled. How do you plan on meeting that? Simply only providing power for three to four hours per day?

Here's what our realistic solutions to providing electricity are:

COAL: Poison world with carcinogens. Contribute to global warming.

NUCLEAR: No global warming. 99%+ chance no carcinogens. Very small but non-zero chance of increasing local cancer risk near unpopulated area at some point in the future.

CANDLES AND MATCHES: No electricity.

Poison that never goes away (or close enough to make no difference to the rest of us). No safe method of disposal. No place to put it where it won't endanger future generations.

20-40 years of full scale energy generation will produce untold gallons of waste that will contaminate how much?

Nuclear waste is bad. Coal waste is worse. Not having electricty is worse still.

Certainly not YOURS.

How do you plan on providing electricity? Do you really believe that poisoning (and heating) the Earth with coal is a better choice?

(The answer to your question is, in Yucca.)

As they've said over and over again. But you want to put it there anyway, right?

You figure out what to do with the waste which doesn't involve running rampant over the rights of others, and then I'll accept your point. Until then...

edited for spelling correction

(I'll apologize to all the residents of the interior of Yucca Mountain for you.)

Yours either, I presume. But I'm not going to okay taking a radioactive shit on the residents of Nevada...human and otherwise...for the sake of expedience.

Unless you're going to also say what you would prefer, that doesn't say much of anything. I admit that nuclear waste is problematic. But it is far less problematic than coal, and those are the only viable forms of energy at the moment. Saying "we shouldn't do it because it's bad" ignores the fact that our other option is far worse.

Equally bad, perhaps. But not "far worse." One can cause more damage in the short term, but the other can cause more damage in the long term, over a much longer period of time. You figure how to get the crap out of the gravity well and toss it into the sun and I'll climb right on board. But as long as it's going to be down here, I am going to oppose the idea.

The problem is that the way these things work in our socio-econo-political system is that it will be BEGAN as a "short term solution until we get other options on-line" but will evolve into "hey, it's working great, why bother with anything else?"

And in the meantime the waste will continue to pile up until Yucca mountain can't hold it all. Then we'll have to find somewhere else to store it.

Good luck with that.

If unchecked, it will render large swaths of the Earth permanently uninhabitable. The absolute worst case scenario for nuclear power is that civilization collapses due to some other incident, Yucca fails, nobody notices, and the area around it is poisoned.

Launch it into the sun? That's not gonna work until we can get a 100% launch success rate.

I think old iron mines in Minnesota or Michigan could be converted to waste storage sites without undue problems. Despite the hazardous nature of the waste the total volume we are talking about is not a great amount in relative terms.

Wrong!!!

Quit passing on that pro-oil/gas/nuclear lobby bullshit...

If you say renewables and conservation it won't be enough to combat climate change.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt...

Problem?

Yucca Mountain is not a good site for waste disposal, it never has been.

It is imperfect, in the same "an asteroid could crush the site spewing radiation everywhere" sort of way any site would be. However, the failure scenarios of Yucca are extraordinarily unlikely and utterly inconsequential in scope compared to the threats posed by coal exhaust and global warming.

"What are you going to do with the waste" is a good question that deserves a well-thought-out plan. It is also a minor question compared to "How are you going to provide electricity to America while avoiding flooding Manhattan," or even "what are you going to do with the pollutants coal plants emit?"

but even if you can bully Nevada into accepting the waste, it won't all fit in Yucca Mountain.

by confused and self-destructive environmentalists.

recycle

:nuke::nuke::nuke::nuke:

1991 DOE survey of harvestable wind resources has found that there is enough harvestable wind energy in three states alone, N. Dakota, Kansas and Texas to fulfill all of our electrical needs through the year 2030, including factoring in for growth. This is not to we need to pave over those three states with wind turbines, this simply goes to show the potential we have here. The US has been described repeatedly as the Saudi Arabia of wind. Why not start using it?

Solar is showing increasingly greater potential. We've recently had breathroughs not only in the efficiency of solar panels, but also in how they can be applied. Solar offers an excellent source for supplemental power.

Biodiesel can fulfill all of our transportation fuel needs. All that we need oil bearing algae as the feedstock, and 15,000 sq miles of water surface area. Bonus, not only is biodiesel much cleaner burning, but the waste products of refining are water and glycerin.

There are many alternatives to using nuclear. Nuclear power is inherently dangerous for two huge reasons, we have no safe way to store the waste, and we have no way of eliminating human error. There is no such thing as a safe nuclear plant, for the dirty little secret of the nuclear industry is that virtually every nuclear plant has had some sort of incident, either major or minor, that resulted in a release into the environment. And if they haven't yet, they will.

Yucca Mt., located at the conjunction of two major faults, is a disaster waiting to happen. EPA dye tests have found that if there is some sort of leakage that occurs, it could get into the groundwater of Las Vegas within two weeks. All that we're doing with nuclear waste is passing a problem on down to future generations.

Then there is the matter of water. Nuclear power is a water intensive industry, used for both cooling and driving the turbines. Yet we want to fire up more nukes when we're starting to run dry. Hell, a couple of summers ago France had to shut down many reactors due to drought and low water levels. A reactor up in Minnesota had to do the same this past summer. In this time of growing water scarcity, is it a real bright idea to burden ourselves with water intensive reactors? I don't think so.

We don't need nuclear, and we should not pursue nuclear any more. Right now, with the limited amount of reactors that we have, we have limited exposure. However if we fire up our nuclear program again, our chances for catastrophic, or even not so catastrophic problems rise significantly.

We have the answers we need to our energy problem. The trouble isn't with alternative tech, it is with retrograde thinking. Wind and solar and other green energy sources are much more de-centralized than our current energy model. Rather than giving an entire corporate sector massive monetary incentives, going with the alternatives would give those incentives to the people instead, a big no-no on corporate Capital Hill. And such energy alternatives means that the costs are paid up front, instead of being rolled out on a monthly basis as favored by the corporate energy giants.

It is time for an energy paradigm shift in this country away from centralized, dangerous and polluting power to cleaner, greener, decentralized power. Sadly, this probably won't happen in the near future, given the corporate stranglehold on government. By the time we realize our mistake however, it might just be too late.

This is a very effective argument. And I thought I'd heard something like that about Yucca Mountain.

I swear this is the third thread on this subject started by you. Or is it just a way to get at Edwards' supporters?

Either way nuclear energy still doesn't make sense. I would much rather see our roofs plastered with solar collectors than build a nuclear reactor. Besides when I went to read up on it, they want to start building reactors with modules to cut down costs. I can see it now, we make all these reactors and then 3 years after they are built we find one of the modules has a fatal flaw in it and we have to shut down all the reactors. Egad!

By the time we gear up to build reactors, who knows where solar, wind and other alternatives will be. Besides, what a way to build up our economy. A thousand different energy think tanks producing products will employ many more jobs than 1 company making reactor modules. This will also produce innovation on a grand scale. Americans can be very inventive when they need to be.

zalinda

"roll the dice and hope someone comes up with a solution in 20 or 40 years" is a good plan for combatting global warming. Just me. In fact, come to think of it, that's pretty much the free-marketeer non-solution.

(Solar power is unfathomably expensive. Right now, despite all the money spent on it, and all the hype, less than one tenth of one percent of our energy needs are met by solar--and that doesn't begin to cover its uselessness in cloudy weather, and diminished effectiveness in winter. In order to ensure massive blackouts didn't occur on cloudy November weeks, we'd have to have enormous redundancy built in.)

An older British actor (and I can't remember his name) talked about how he has put solar collectors up in this UK home. He gets enough energy to run his home and sometimes a little extra. This is England where I think cloudy is more the norm, but I could be wrong. I hadn't thought that solar was an good in places where half the time it is cloudy, but I guess they are getting so good that it's becoming more workable. And all this has happened within a few years time.

zalinda

Saddling the planet with nuclear waste for the foreseeable future is not exactly the best way to combat global warming.

I'm glad that there is more than one Democratic nominee opposed to such a disastrous move.

It's just another problem.

Nuclear is the best of bad options.

If you ask me, it's equally bad.

Unless you live inside a mountain, that is.

for thousands of years, it's short-sighted to assume no one will ever have to deal with it.

the potentiality that someone will be inconvenienced hundreds of years from now while completely ignoring the poisons and greenhouse gases released by coal.

Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, possible long-term irradiation of the groundwater and soil for future generations to handle is just "inconvenient."

But, hell, it's just a desert, right? Nothing lives there anyway, right?

The death of everything within a 1000-mile radius.

an active nuclear power plant staffed by people untrained in basic safety protocols, with no functional bureaucracy providing oversight.

I mean with those wonderful responsible corporate citizens who are enforced by regulatory commissions headed by Bush appointees, what could there possibly be to worry about?

Aside from Three Mile Island and this: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0507-01.htm

and competent regulators.

What if there is a disaster? We were extremely fortunate to have avoided the Davis Besse incident, Ohio nearly faced a massive calamity to both the people and our environment. There are enormous risks with nuclear power, and people seem to ignore those risks.

That is a question for emergency management personnel. The question we ought ask is, "how likely?"

This is an event far more likely to happen than you would likely to believe. It has already happened at Chernobyl, and came dangerously close at Three Mile Island and Davis Besse here in the US. All it takes is one incident and you have a major catastrophe on your hands, and I don't trust our regulatory agencies which are staffed by former industry executives.

Climate change or a a nuclear wasteland?

It's not only NOT a solution, it's worse than the crisis used to promote it.

Yeah, okay. Where have we heard THAT before?

Have there been other examples of mountain waste containment failing?

We're not talking about a substance that becomes inert in a couple hundred years. Anything could happen, and given the way things often work, it probably will.

What hyperbole.

It's exaggerating to suggest that increasing the number of nuclear power plants also increases the probability of accidents, which no scientist can guarantee will not happen.

I consider Chernobyl to be a nuclear wasteland. How many sites of such accidents are acceptable in the U.S.? None are acceptable to me.

I have read the studies concerning the disposal of nuclear waste. I really don't care how someone might pontificate on the "low level" of risk. Risk is risk, and nuclear "risk" lasts a long time.

When I'm looking for alternative, sustainable energy sources, I'm looking for those that don't carry those kinds of risks, and I'm not going to support anyone who is willing for us to bear those risks.

I'm sure that none of those promoting the use of nuclear energy actually plan to allow a nuclear waste site in their neighborhood.

Let me know when Senators Clinton and Obama agree to live in the same neighborhood as the power source they support.

DK is not a pro nuke candidate. Of course, they mostly ignore him, after tarring him with the same brush as they used on McCain.

that the ONLY way to reverse global climate change is to radically reduce your environmental footprint...especially the gigantic USamerukan footprint...

Any of you assholes who think you can sustain the "amerikan way of life" are pissing into a headwind!

Get real, jerkwads!

Edwards is the only one with his head screwed on straight on this issue...

The planet fries.

Meanwhile, we thick-headed jerkwads will discuss ways we can effectively diminish the national environmental footprints. Hoping people will suddenly turn into ascetics is not realistic. I'd certainly be in favor of higher taxes on gas and electricity to force that, but I'd rather open a second front against climate change and go after power plants.