Reality check: 1995 article predicts the solar future by 2005.

[NNadir]

Solar-Assisted Automobiles: The annual Tour de Sol solar car race, with its science fiction-style automobiles, still attracts media attention, but most of our experts agree that mass-market solar-propelled cars won't be parked in our garages in the foreseeable future. However, those polled think that in 15 years, most cars will use some onboard solar-power generation. Osborn says solar assistance will be "important to long battery life because of the heavy drain of computer and security systems." He also agrees with Goodman, who says that another beneficial use of the technology is providing "auxiliary power for ventilation while a car is parked." Strong thinks photovoltaic sunroof or rear-spoiler collectors may be incorporated in near-future auto designs.

Only 5 years left...

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/reality_check.html

I'm sure we could all use at this point a picture of a Prius with solar cells on top.

Personally I'm surprised to learn that solar power only cost 9.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 1995 since according to solar buzz it costs 21.33 cents today. http://www.solarbuzz.com/

The other "expert" opinions are set out in a nice table and I leave it for everyone to see how well these 1995 expectations have been matched by our day to day experience.

Of course, no one should rain on the parade of the insistence that solar electricity is the way to back out of the wholesale unimaginable catastrophe of global climate change. When dealing with issues like the wholesale acificiation of the oceans, the desertification of vast stretches of the earth's agricultural heartland, the destruction of many of the world's species and habitats, the last thing anyone would want is a "reality check."

[mainegreen]

1. Hell man, in 5 years cars will *fly*!

:7

[NNadir]

2. To the moon.

And then to Jupiter. With Hal the computer at our side.

[One_Life_To_Give]

5. Outdated, HAL is so 2001! n/t

[NNadir]

11. It's odd to have the future in which I so believed be outdated.

When you've been around for more than half a century, you develop a certain jaded outlook on what people say about the future.

Donald Fagen of my generation wrote with elegant cynicism of how we viewed the future when I was young:

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by seventy-six we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Get your ticket to that wheel in space
While there's time
The fix is in
You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky
You know we've got to win
Here at home we'll play in the city
Powered by the sun
Perfect weather for a streamlined world
There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
(More leisure for artists everywhere)
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free yes and eternally young

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free

Eternally free and eternally young...

...Sigh.

http://www.davemcnally.com/lyrics/FagenDonald/IGY.asp

Oh to have found out that the real motivation behind the Kennedy administration was tawdry sex with Marilyn Monroe!

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Oh, the Humanity!

There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone
:scared:
Malthusian dystopias in a climate-shifted ecological desert don't seem so bad anymore...

[phantom power]

23. Here in America, we came perilously close to being Spandex-Nation in the 80s...

the horror... the horror...

[ramapo]

25. It was those damn '60s

I'm 51 so I too grew up thinking that the future would be better.

We had charismatic, forward-thinking leaders.

We grew up watching the amazing leaps and bounds of technology as the U.S went to the moon.

Richard Nixon, of all people, created the EPA, the war on cancer, and saw the Clean Air/Water legislation signed into law. Sure his motivation was political but he did it.

The middle-class was growing.

Nuclear power was the energy source of the future.

The dollar was still worth something.

The civil rights movement made incredible advances.

Yes there was the horror of Vietnam and much wrong domestically but there was an underlying hope of progress and achievement.

In my book, it's been downhill since around 1972.

[hunter]

26. I got my first internet account in 1979...

These days there's a SUPERCOMPUTER that I built out of junk sitting on my desk, using Open Source software, connected to a very fat pipe.

I have hope.

[cyberpj]

3. Hey - when I was in grade school we all thought we'd have Jetson cars by 2000! nt

[Jeffery]

4. solar feasibility

They COULD have made it work, but it hasn't been a priority, and some on the Hill don't WANT to, for many reasons. America has been busy at war over oil, for one.

[Porcupine]

6. Reality Check.b nuclear powered cars to be available..........

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon">Ford Nucleon was going to save us all the trouble of stopping for gas. Every other month the reactor would be swapped out for service.

Solar powered charge assist on vehicles like the Prius or the Tesla car is quite feasible. It won't power the vehicle but it sure will help things along. If the panels are placed shading otherwise blazing hot parking spaces even gas fueled cars would save by reduced AC loading.

Technology writers are always more optomistic than reality or the market can provide. Here in California we're still paying the debt on those "too cheap to meter" power plants at Rancho Seco and Diablo Canyon. Meanwhile gas stations are sprouting banks of solar panels. Go figure.

[NNadir]

7. Well of course I know that you have lots of too cheap to meter energy.

The 1954 comment by Strauss that nuclear energy would be too "too cheap to meter" is often cited by nuclear exceptionalists in an attempt to deny the fact that nuclear energy is cleaner and safer (and generally) cheaper than all of its alternatives.

No one, zero people, has/have said that nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter in the last 50 years. It is however, if one includes the external costs of environmental destruction and damage to health, the cheapest form of primary energy known. Apparently that is not enough for some people.

On the other hand, people - as shown in the opening post of this thread - continue to make ridiculously optimistic statements about solar energy in a time of global climate change when the lives of every man, woman, child, plant and animal is threatened by global climate change.. The fact that in contrast to Mr. Strauss that these people, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, have been undeterred from making such assertions after making millions of predictions that have been invalidated by experience is very cogent and indicative of the hypocrisy and wrong headedness of the entire anti-nuclear movement.

Maybe you think that we should be comforted that statements such as yours about the alleged options to power rich boy's toys should be comforting. They are not.

Energy is serious. It is critical. It is not for speculative jerking around.

You are in fact asserting - not in 1954 but today - an absurd promise about your pet form of energy. Unlike Mr. Strauss, who was speaking before a single commercial nuclear plant had been built anywhere on the planet, you are speaking about a form of energy that people like you keep insisting is commercial, even though not one exajoule of solar PV energy has ever been produced on the planet in a single year. (World energy demand is now over 460 exajoules annually. The solar cell was invented in 1954, just 12 years after the nuclear reactor.)

There is not one mass production car that has the surface area to run on solar energy. "Solar assists" where you produce 0.001% of the energy to run the car are just, well, fraudulent attempts to misrepresent the realities of the situation. Here's a fact for you: One gallon of gasoline contains 132 MJ. http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

Here's another "inconvenient truth" for you: A Prius's dimensions are known and easily measured:

http://www.toyota.com/prius/specs.html

Likewise the amount of incident energy in a given surface area and the efficiency of fuel cells is also known. A little calculation - and I get tired as hell of reproducing these - will easily show how long a Toyota Prius will need to stand in the sun light to produce the energy found in one gallon of gasoline. (The solar flux - even in outer space in near earth orbit is also known, maybe you are speaking about Priuses and Tesla's in orbit.)

As for your comments about Rancho Seco, that reactor was shut by public stupidity and nothing else. Some people have alleged in this space that the plant was "replaced" by the pathetic array of solar cells outside the plant, put there by SMUD maybe as an act of comedy. So much for the comprehension of simple arithmetic in the Sacramento area.

The Diablo Canyon is one of the most spectacular successes among the many successes of nuclear power. In 2005 reactors in 2005 produced 17,755 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2005, avoiding many millions of tons of carbon dioxide, unremarked by you.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesca.html

For contrast, in the entire United States, the amount of energy produced by all of the solar PV was 579 million kilowatt-hours:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/trends/table11.html

There you have it: The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant produces, on just a few acres of land, surrounded by 12,000 acres of pristine coastal wilderness, far more energy, by orders of magnitude, than all of the solar PV installations in the rest of the country, facilities that cover many thousands of acres.

Every single nuclear power plant that has been shut by public agitation has been replaced by fossil fuels, from Maine to California, from Sweden to Germany to Italy. What is particularly insulting to human reason and intelligence is that many of the people who have deliberately misrepresented affairs to bring about this outcome represent themselves as environmentalists. They are not environmentalists. They are merely people who believe that the majority of the people on the planet cannot add or subtract or multiply or divide. Anyone who agitates for shutting Diablo Canyon is merely making an announcement that they want more fossil fuels put in use.

One of the first prerequisites to being an environmentalist is to be realistic that climate change is real, is serious, and needs immediate address. It is not an issue that will wait for all of the world's rich brats to go out and buy themselves a new Tesla sportscar for $80,000 dollars. Climate change, which affects all of humanity, from those living in mud huts to those with seven sports cars in the garages of their McMansions, cannot be addressed without the use of nuclear power. All the piddling promises of the "solar will save us" crowd, tediously repeated (unlike Strauss' "too cheap to meter") year after year after year, those dating to the 1950's, those (like the one produced in the OP) from the 1990's, and those being repeated now have no physical bearing on this reality, none at all.

The middle class (and upper class) denial bullshit about Priuses and Tesla sports cars is not even remotely serious when viewed in these terms.

[hunter]

8. From my own research and memory Rancho Seco was a cranky machine.

It is very evocative of British machines. Maybe it should have been shut down, but perhaps with a lot less politics it could have been operated successfully. Some machines are particularly fussy, operator experience and intuition are everything. I've read that San Onofre One was shut down simply because the people who understood the machine's quirks were retiring.

The claim that Rancho Seco's leaks were killing babies is ludicrous to me. The area is a toxic cesspool of agricultural chemicals. It seems much more likely to me that it was these chemicals doing most of the damage attributed to Rancho Seco.

I attended all the major rallies against Diablo Canyon, and did a lot of digging through PG&E's paperwork. My opposition to that plant was, at best, misguided.

[NNadir]

9. It was indeed. It was a very poor performer.

It really wasn't a great loss, Rancho Seco. I think it's overall capacity utilization, while double that of a solar facility, was in the abysmal 40-50% range. The US average for nuclear capacity utilization is now over 90%.

Racho Seco's poor performance was already requiring the use of a lot of fossil fuels. As it happens, SMUD is building another power plant there, a gas plant of course.

I am a veteran of the opposition to Shoreham. Unlike you, I regret to say we succeeded in stopping the plant. It's ironic that so much of Long Island is low lying. Probably one of the few surviving parts of Long Island after sea level rise will be the bluffs where Shoreham stood.

[Porcupine]

13. Nuclear power is not a real solution. Deal with it.

Dr. Helen Caldicott has outlined why far better than I can.

I was sure nuclear was dead in America when I saw a television clip of Bruce Willis, a republican actor, protesting the siting of a low level waste disposal facility in Idaho. If you can't sucker republicans in Idaho to buy nukes you can't get anybody anywhere.

Closer to home; after the Enron fiasco nobody is going to trust the government or corporations to build a new power plant. Diablo Canyon shut down and Enron pushed California into a series of fraudulent blackouts.

My mom has solar panels in her parking lot that work just fine thank you. So does the county jail, the sewage treatment plant, the local business college and several gas stations. They can be installed with about 2 months planning and little or no political problems. All of these units were built without massive cost overruns or black budget subsidies from the government. When they die we can recycle them without the need of a military escort.

Here in California we could probably eliminate the load equivilant of Diablo Canyon by replacing old AC units with geothermal loop systems, painting our roofs white and changeing out all our light bulbs. The wind blows on the coastal hills almost 24/7. Inland the sun shines more than enough to make solar thermal plants a reality.

I know personally people living in rammed earth, straw bale and passive solar houses; they are comfortable and practical. Very little power is required by these buildings at night.

The Prius is practical; my sister has one. I could easily drive a electric truck if Ford hadn't cancelled it's program. The Tesla car demonstrates that the technology is available to apply to other vehicles. More practically we could rebuild the networks of light rail that the US used to have. We could even electrify the interstates for trucking to use saving diesel. All practical.

Nobody needs nuclear power and only a few crazies want it. Clean up the waste from existing plants then talk to us.

[NNadir]

14. Dr. Helen Caldicott knows zero about nuclear power.

Deal with it.

The world has completely rejected her rather confused ramblings about subjects about which she is completely uninformed and about for which she has no qualifications to comment.

I'm really uninterested in whether your mom has enough money to put solar cells in her parking lot. Even though I hear from a few people here about how their sister or grand mother or cousin's friend has a solar cell, I still don't here about a single exajoule of solar electricity produced on the entire planet. I'm sure you don't care in your little middle class isolated world, where we have Mom's who own parking lots, about anyone else, but the rest of the world beyond your mom's garage needs 467 exajoules just to survive, and that's with more than half the planet living in desperate poverty that neither you nor your mom can imagine.

I lived in California probably before you were born. I heard all of the shit that you are still talking about now back then and I note that more than a decade and a half after I left it's all still talk. Maybe you think this crap about solar roofs and "geothermal" electrically powered heat pumps is new? Give me a break. They were talking that way when my mom was alive, and she's been dead for thirty years.

I'm sure that you regard most of the world's scientific establishment, much of the world's public, people who have spent many years of their lives participating in technically demanding fields like nuclear engineering, involving rigorous course work in nuclear physics, materials science, advanced calculus, chemistry, probability analysis as a "few crazies," but what the hell, you take Helen Caldicott seriously.

As it happens the grown up world - which is beginning to take climate change seriously - doesn't care what you think. Just about every week the consideration of a new reactor somewhere in the world is announced. If somebody has to "deal" with something, it would be you.

[Porcupine]

16. We can't produce our way out of the energy crisis.

The only path to a sane, biologically sound, world is conservation. The first thing we have to give up is the myth of producing more of everything as the optimal solution to a given problem.

Even assuming that humans get cheap fusion power, space elevators and a cheap way to build O'Neil space colonies the human race would eventually run out of resources in this solar system. The excess heat of human activity would cause climate change on Earth if we quit burning fossil fuels today. I would suggest reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eyehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God's_Eye">The Mote in Gods Eye as a parable for the perils of technical solutions for environmental problems.

People don't need of want energy by itself. People want services like food, housing, clothing, transportation, entertainment and medical care. These can be provided on a far cheaper per/capita energy budget than what we now use. Using people like my associates as examples it is clear that even americans can manage quite happily on energy budgets that do not require nuclear power.

There is no need for nuclear power. Nuclear power plants always, every single time produce insanely toxic waste products that will last longer than the scope of human history. No other power source, including coal, produces concentrated toxic waste on that scale. (yes plutonium is far more toxic than mercury)

The continued promotion of nuclear power is nothing less than the continued promotion of pollution and toxic waste production for profit. Nothing less.

[NNadir]

17. Who should conserve? Let me guess...

the Chadians...the Somalis...

This usually comes as surprise to those who are anti-nuclear, most of whom are decidedly middle class, but many of the people of the world cannot conserve very well because they have nothing to begin with.

One of the real interesting bit of teeth gnashing began when the previously impoverished Chinese and Indian decided to try to start living the same lifestyle as a typical member of the Greenpeace party in Germany.

It is nonsensical to insist that the world doesn't need nuclear power when half the world is living in desperate poverty, when billions of people have no access to clean water or electricity.

As for the typical misrepresentation about issues of toxicity of plutonium, there is not one person on this website who has ever produced a single case of a single person who has died or been injured by exposure to plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. Not one. Comparisons between the toxicity of mercury and plutonium are therefore without merit and are based on a very poor understanding of both science and scale.

The total mass of spent nuclear fuel for the entire history of nuclear power production in the United States is about 75,000 metric tons. Of this, about 1% is plutonium - all of which is considered by most rational people to be a potential fuel resource. Thus there is, rounding up, about 1000 MT of plutonium produced over 50 years from nuclear operations. All of this plutonium is contained in a volume about the equivalent of a school gym. None of it has affected a single person off the grounds of a nuclear facility.

Contrast with the mercury from coal that you think is more dangerous. Every year, according to this (dated) scientific paper linked below, 49,000 tons of mercury are released into the atmosphere, soil and water by coal fired power plants. It is not restricted in anyway and in this sense is completely unlike plutonium in the sense that the plutonium remains in the plant. Let us assume that a kg of plutonium somehow by magic escaped from spent nuclear fuel and made a beeline to find members of Greenpeace and concentrate. It would have to be 49,000 times as toxic as mercury to have the same effect. It isn't. It's not even close. As it happens, though, one of the other heavy metal pollutants associated with coal is (gasp) uranium.

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/esthag/1979/13/i06/f-pdf/f_es60154a005.pdf?sessid=8569

On the uranium content of coal: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html (The radioactivity released by a coal plant is greater than the radioactivity released by a nuclear plant.)

Of course, returning to mercury, mercury from coal is causing tremendous damage to the environment, but the most serious damage, of course, is the billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide released each year. We know what to do with so called "nuclear waste": We isolate it and when we need it, we recycle it to recover valuable materials and the full fuel value. The tiny quantities left over, we isolate in a small volume. On the contrary, nobody has any idea what to do with coal waste. This is why the external cost of coal (as well as of oil and natural gas) is so extraordinarily high when compared to nuclear energy.

Opposition to nuclear power is always based on complete distortions and misrepresentation as well as a parochial outlook. Almost always this paraochail middle class outlook is represented but the westerner who recites them like so many "Hail Marys," thinking that the listener cannot think critically. The conceit is that only nuclear energy must be perfect, while any other form of energy associated with the status quo can be infinitely dangerous. Nuclear energy is safer than biofuels. Nuclear is safer than solar (but only slightly so). It is vastly safer than coal, natural gas, and oil. But nuclear energy is not without risk. In fact there is no such thing as risk free energy. There is only risk minimized energy. That energy is nuclear energy.

As always, the claims against nuclear power do not stand up to scrutiny. This is why such arguments have been rejected throughout the world. They involve poor thinking.

[Porcupine]

18. You neglect Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Iraq in your death counts.

The fuel that powered Nagasaki came from a reactor. Chernobyl's radiation which has killed thousands surely included a fair amount of plutonium. That came from an operational reactor.

In Iraq the U.S. military set of a chain of events that has accounted for 600,000 deaths with the mere threat of nuclear weapons as a political cover for the invasion. Without the "Saddam has Nukes" excuse there would never have been Gulf War's I or II. Millions have been killed by the US on the mere threat of nuclear weapons made from the by products of reactors.

You very carefully parse your arguements to avoid the actual deaths from plutonium and nuclear reactors:

As for the typical misrepresentation about issues of toxicity of plutonium, there is not one person on this website who has ever produced a single case of a single person who has died or been injured by exposure to plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. Not one. Comparisons between the toxicity of mercury and plutonium are therefore without merit and are based on a very poor understanding of both science and scale.(emphasis mine)

Never mind the regular reactor accidents, the regular plant accidents, the military forces kept in place and deployed to control the nuclear fuel. Never mind this guy in Japan killed in what he that was a routine procedure. http://www.bredl.org/nuclear/tokaiaccident.htm Ignore the several reactor failures on russian subs. Because we can't say that plutonium alone killed them.

Not to excuse the pollution caused by coal plants but mercury binds up in ways that make it biologically inert. I have some in my mouth right now. I also have several little tubes of mercury in a jar collected from thermostats. If I had that much plutonium I would be committing several federal felonies. Armed men in bunny suits would have come and collected it from me.

I really don't thing the Chadians or the Somali's should have nuclear reactors. I really do think that distributed solar and wind power systems could power deep well pumps in areas where nobody is going to run power lines due to the cost.

We understand the science and scale. We understand the politics. We also understand that the nuclear power indudstry spends millions and millions of dollars yearly telling us how safe it is. We don't believe them any more that we should believe Jeffry Skilling and George Bush and for the same reasons.

[NNadir]

19. This is about the speed I expect of course.

I notice that you make no representations about all of the bombs that killed people since 1945 were fueled by material that passed through an oil refinery. Let me wonder how many times you have called for the banning of petroleum because of the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden and Hamburg. Thousands? Millions? How about zero?.

So what is the excuse of the "make shit up" because I have no valid arguments crowd today? That Iraq is about nuclear energy? It had nothing to do with oil? Is that the representation? Do you expect that to be dignified with more than absurd laughter?

Let me be clear: I immediately knew that Dick Cheney was lying when he made a big deal about the Niger uranium. Why did I know? Because I understand nuclear technology, because I am educated. Only those people who are not educated are still using increasingly tortured logic to argue that the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction and that anything nuclear was involved. For the record, here is how many nuclear power reactors are in Iraq: Zero. Can't count that high?

People bought the "Saddam has nukes" argument because they bought the same anti-nuclear mysticism that is published routinely by Greenpeace. If people did not buy into ignorance - which includes the ignorance represented by a willingness to accept the dangerous status quo - the war in Iraq would have never happened.

I do call for the banning of oil. I think it's too dangerous, and it's not about the napalm. In fact, despite your ridiculous assertions that "Mercury isn't that bad" because "if I had plutonium it would be a crime," I call for the banning of all fossil fuels within the next twenty years. For the record, the energy industry continuously pours mercury into my body and the bodies of my family. I can't stop it. In contrast the nuclear industry does not continuously pour plutonium into anyone's flesh. Worldwide the plutonium is contained. Those of us who support nuclear energy expect that the day will come that the plutonium is recovered and is used to produce more energy. (This day has already arrived in many countries, including Belgium, Switzerland, France and Japan.)

But let's tear even farther into your even more absurd comparison between plutonium and mercury. You say "if I had plutonium." I could say, "if I were king of Tasmania..." Does that mean anything? Do you have plutonium? No, you don't. Do you know how to get it? No you don't. You couldn't have access to it in a million years, because you don't have a fucking clue about how to get near it or the equipment to do so. So you're presenting a completely hypothetical argument that like all anti-nuclear arguments is not even remotely connected with reality.

Reality. What a concept!

Oil is cool with you and you don't call for banning it because you cannot make simple comparisons. Tens of millions of people around the world have been incinerated by oil products dropped from planes fueled by oil products, and suddenly you announce that nuclear is a dangerous technology. Suppose I ask this question: In the last fifty years how many people have died in nuclear war or nuclear related terrorist events? The answer: Zero. Now, what were the guys flying the aircraft into the World Trade Center doing it for? Have you heard of that event? No? Let me tell you about it. Some nationals from a country called Saudi Arabia hijacked some planes and crashed them into prominent buildings in New York and Washington. Ring a bell? Let me tell you something about that case: They were concerned about their country's relationship with the US because of the US concern for access to their country's oil.

Because you can't make simple comparisons your representation that you understand science and you don't understand scale is absurd on its face. You don't understand science. You don't understand scale. I'll add that you clearly don't understand politics and you don't understand history. This is why you are anti-nuclear, because you don't understand very much at all. This is also why you elevate "this guy in Japan killed" above all of the people who die in normal operations of coal plants.

You insist that only nuclear energy have zero risks but you accept any risk - no matter how many millions of people that are killed - of the status quo. I don't accept the status quo. I support the world's decision to embrace nuclear energy and to reject nuclear ignorance.

Let us assume the completely ridiculous case that Nagasaki and Hiroshima and "this guy killed in Japan" can all be attributed to nuclear power technology. How do these events that occurred more than sixty years ago compare to the number of coal, oil and natural gas deaths that have occurred in the last year, starting from 15 seconds ago?

By the way, how does "this guy killed in Japan" compare to some fellows killed in a coal mine? In February of this year, I asked if anyone gave a shit about the 65 coal miners who were killed in our neighboring country, Mexico. I kept pleading for someone to give a shit about these poor guys. I guess it just wasn't all that sexy though.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x43122

Everyone here can produce a picture of the reactor at Chernobyl in a heartbeat but I had a real hard time getting any one to give a flying fuck about these guys. I can't find out if they ever even recovered the bodies. They'll be no Greenpeace commemorations of their deaths. No gnashing of teeth. No attention. It would be one thing if it was only Mexico and this one event, but it isn't. Coal mining and coal pollution kills tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people every year. And YOU don't give a shit.

I'm sure too that you don't think the Chadians should have nuclear reactors. One of the chief conceits of the western middle class "renewables will save us" crowd is that only they have the right to energy. That's entirely my point. The renewable fantasy doesn't give a shit about impoverished nations, and that's - at least in my view - a huge moral problem. The fact is though, I think your "I'm a westerner and therefore I'm entitled" crap is moral bullshit. It's racist, and it's wrong.

And now, as further evidence that nobody cares what you think, I'll give you an address from Nigerian President OLUSEGUN OBASANJO from a few months ago. The full text is available here:

http://www.nigeria.gov.ng/speeches_BoardoftheNigeriaAtomicEnergy.aspx

Here's an excerpt:

The global picture on the utilization of nuclear energy for the generation of electricity is becoming brighter by the day, and holds some good promise for the developing world, particularly for us in Nigeria. This technology will enable us to diversify our electricity generation base beyond oil and gas and hydro, to include nuclear and coal...

...The establishment of the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NNRA) in February 2001 has provided a veritable regulatory framework for superintending the security, safety and safeguards inherent in the operations of a peaceful nuclear industry in the country. This and other related actions of government have also presented Nigeria as a credible and reliable player within the international community; in particular, earning the confidence of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and guaranteeing unimpeded technical cooperation with all other countries within the framework of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to which we are signatory.

I wish to further affirm that Nigeria’s aspirations for the acquisition of nuclear technology are for purely peaceful applications and that we are unequivocally committed to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

It is important to emphasize here that, while adhering to the spirit and letter of the Pelindaba Treaty, which declares the continent of Africa as a nuclear weapons free zone, we shall position our country to derive maximum benefits from the proper application of nuclear technology for peaceful proposes.

Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and our friendly development partners who have attained proficiency in the development and deployment of nuclear power plants for electricity generation, it takes about 10-12 years from project conception and planning to the actual commissioning of a nuclear power plant project. This time frame is an international benchmark, and with all sincerity, we shall mobilize the necessary resources needed to achieve it...

I guess the President of Nigeria thinks his people are human beings entitled to full rights as citizens of the world. He believes that this right as a member of the community of nations entitles his country to have access to safe clean energy, the safest and cleanest energy, energy represented by nuclear energy. I agree. I'm sure I'll hear lots of whining about that contention, but I believe that he is actually 100% right.

[Porcupine]

21. Ok, I concede your point about oil deaths and coal deaths.

I am actually in favor of carbon taxation scaled to make such fuels unnaceptably expensive in about 25 years. I am also in favor of fat guys getting free sex. I give both proposals about the same chance in the political arena short of another 3-4 Katrina type events.

Big oil and big coal companies are probably responsible for at least a million deaths due to political wrangling over control of the resource. Then there are mine deaths and refinery fires. I've actually seen several refinery fires in Contra Costa County CA.; they are not pretty but you can clean up the ash with soap and water and move back into the area a few weeks later.

Supposing that nuclear nations never ever developed weapons like Pakistan, India and N. Korea just did. Even still I am opposed to nuclear power because it is centralized and militarized power. Once a nuclear reactor operates it becomes a military zone until it is decomissioned. Then the waste has to be protected by military force. Because people can make very nasty weapons with it.

Finally the reactors promote centralized political power. As a California resident I no longer find it funny to have Enron types playing with the light switches. I want a decentralized power sytem. Nuclear power will never do that.

Reading back over your earlier posts I noted that you are concerned with population issues. This is good. In the meantime every single means to reduce the energy use of a given human activity must be promoted. This starts with solar ovens for poor people and goes up to shifting as much air travel as possible to dirigibles. EVERY means of reducing demand on the planet must be explored.

Even if nuclear power came online as clean and easy as the mythical "Mr. Fusion" machine we would still need to reduce our environmental impact. The laws of thermodynamics will still overheat the climate due to human activity.

Unlimited power would just encourage us to build ski cabins in Antarctica and submarine yachts for billionaires. The poor would still be as neglected as they are today. South Africa and India both have nuclear power plants AND grinding poverty. More power production will never, ever be the answer.

You keep claiming that anyone opposed to nuclear power is stupid and ill informed. Please continue; we can point to your posts and say "THIS is the kind of person that wants to be in control of your energy future." It really helps us out.

[Dead_Parrot]

22. Your concern over "Enron types" is well justified...

...but that's an effect of US corporate "culture", rather than something implicit in nuclear power - The bizarre theory of self-regulation is a crock of shit, and it's hard to imagine Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerk pulling the plugs on it's Swiss reactors for fun and profit.

A bigger concern is grid failure (as demonstrated nicely by Western Europe a couple of days ago), but unless you can figure a way to get to get wind farms and backup into places like Manhattan, Tokyo, and Mumbai we're still going to need means of generating lots of power and shipping it in.

[NNadir]

27. One of the worst approaches to the environment is to attach political

crap to it.

Personally I think that the libertarian "every man for himself" stuff is about the worst political philosophy there is. It leads almost invariably to point source pollution. If you want to know what point source pollution is, look at the automobile. It is intractable and impossible to manage. However the automobile does liberate people from being controlled by corporatist railroads I guess. It was a great victory for the human race when personal transportation was liberated from the railroads, no?

This may come as news to libertarians, but human beings are social animals who work cooperatively.

I do regard opposition to nuclear power as stupid and ill informed. I can think of few things that are as stupid and ill-informed, in fact. The anti-nuclear position is a form of ignorance couched in pseudo-scientific terms. It is on a par with creationism and many other forms of mysticism.

I am aware that there are a generally self referential group of people who point to my posts as validation for their curious - and internationally rejected - world view. I am also aware that there are a number of religious fundamentalists who point to the work of other types of scientists as validation of their biases.

If you think that solar ovens are an important mechanism for the elimination of poverty, I assume that you are decidedly middle class and totally unfamiliar with the realities of poverty on an international scale. If solar ovens were so wonderful, they would be standard practice throughout the third world, and the first world for that matter. They are a band-aid however. It happens that in the third world - and I do realize that you know zero about the subject - biomass is in wide use. In this context it is involved in the destruction of forests and the deaths of many thousands of people daily. (And no, it's not controlled by big corporations.) I have not met one anti-nuclear activist who gives a flying fuck about this situation, but one can read all about it all over the internet and in the scientific literature.

For instance a recent article in Science discusses this. (Science 1 April 2005:
Vol. 308. no. 5718, pp. 98 - 103)

And I quote, knowing immediately that it is very unlikely that there is one anti-nuclear activist in California who gives a shit:

Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Impacts of Biomass and Petroleum Energy Futures in Africa
Robert Bailis,1 Majid Ezzati,2* Daniel M. Kammen1,3*
We analyzed the mortality impacts and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by household energy use in Africa. Under a business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, household indoor air pollution will cause an estimated 9.8 million premature deaths by the year 2030. Gradual and rapid transitions to charcoal would delay 1.0 million and 2.8 million deaths, respectively; similar transitions to petroleum fuels would delay 1.3 million and 3.7 million deaths. Cumulative BAU GHG emissions will be 6.7 billion tons of carbon by 2050, which is 5.6% of Africa's total emissions. Large shifts to the use of fossil fuels would reduce GHG emissions by 1 to 10%...

...Biomass fuels (wood, charcoal, dung, and agricultural residues) are vital to basic welfare and economic activity in developing nations, especially in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where they meet more than 90% of household energy needs in many nations. Combustion of bio-fuels emits pollutants that currently cause over 1.6 million annual deaths globally (400,000 in SSA) (1). Because most of these deaths are among children and women, biomass use is directly or indirectly related to multiple Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (UN), including environmental sustainability, reducing child mortality, and gender equity.

We developed a database of current fuel use and a range of scenarios of household energy futures up to 2050 in SSA (Table 1). Current national-level energy production and consumption (Fig. 1) were estimated from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO's) forest products database and the International Energy Agency's (IEA's) statistical database of countries not in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development...

So there you have your decentralized renewable energy paradise available right now, although apparently it kills people in vast numbers. I note that you are free to move from your middle class neighborhood in California and realize your dreams. Somehow though, I strongly suspect that all you'll do is talk. You won't actually live like this because well, you're decidedly middle class, I bet, and almost certainly discuss these kinds of things in theoretical terms.

It is exactly just such elitist thinking against which I fight. If you think that solar anything is part of a grand egalitarian scheme, I suggest that you attempt to inform yourself of who, exactly, makes the world's solar cells and who owns them. Neither BP nor Sharp are collectivist communes of people trying to smash capitalist excess. In fact both companies market solar energy - which is about all that is done with solar energy - marketing. It certainly doesn't produce significant energy in spite of lots of talk.

Now usually when I post this information about millions of deaths from indoor biomass burning, some rich brat with a trust fund and a fondness for the grand renewable future pipes in with some crap about catalysts and so on, as if people in Africa are routinely purchasing catalysts for the chimneys of their McMansions. That's about par for the course, and very typical of the type of moral indifference that characterizes this issue.

Solar energy is a toy for rich boys to assuage their liberal guilt over the fact that they totally blow off the world's poor and don't give a fuck about poverty and its connection to unrestricted population growth. Solar power is not a serious strategy for energy nor for the environment nor for justice. It simply doesn't produce anything for anyone not rich enough to be a Republican. In fact, in the election today, one of the great marketing strategies used by the Republican is all about solar energy. Brazillion-solar-roofs Arnie is about to be re-elected because of his "Global Warming" strategy which is frankly ridiculous, ineffective, and not even remotely realistic. But ignorant people are buying it, mostly because they are effectively incompetent to think.

I have recently posted here listing the President of Nigeria as one of the people who doesn't give a flying fuck about what middle class brats in California think about energy nor about their rarefied, elitist outlook nor about their incomprehensible libertarian cowboy views. Nigeria, to my personal relief, is going nuclear. They already live in a renewable paradise, and apparently they don't like it very much.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=70867 (Post #19.)

[hunter]

28. The best thing that can happen is urbanization and affluence.

If a semi-starving kid with ten siblings (five of 'em dead) living in a rural environment can move to the city, find a job, find a comfortable apartment, get married, and happily have zero, one, or maybe even two kids, than the world is a better place.

Most other affluent lifestyles, including those of self-righteous wealthy American suburbanites with hybrid cars and solar panels on their roofs, are probably detrimental to earth's environment.

[Dead_Parrot]

20. Biologically inert?

You really don't have a clue about mercury, do you? Here, educate yourself a little: http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update42.htm

[hunter]

24. I've met Helen Caldicott on a few occasions.

I think the first time she may have been doing an interview with my mom, or some group my mom was associated with. (Geez, my mom met Elvis too, before he was really, really famous.)

In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties I had some wonderful adventures as an anti-nuclear activist here in California.

Some of my acquaintances at the time seemed to make Helen Caldicott a bit nervous -- we were sort of scary to the class of people she was trying to appeal to.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. That you feel the need...

...to compare 21st century solar power concepts to 1950's nuclear concepts speaks volumes.

[suziedemocrat]

15. In 1993 I worked for Bell Atlantic and they were investing heavily in Video-on-Demand.

Smart people thought video-on-demand was just around the corner. Guess what, it's still not here, but it's slowly coming. I mean, now most of Keith Olberman is posted on MSNBC. Still, it's not what Bell Atlantic was preparing for over 10 years ago.

Point is, timing is difficult to predict. Too many variables.