Announcing his off-shore oil drilling expansion plans on March 31, Obama said:
I want to emphasize that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies on homegrown fuels and clean energy.
On February 16, in announcing his plan to expand nuclear power, the president said:
My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities – and we’ll continue to provide financing for clean-energy projects…across America.
Yet, even as Obama was announcing his plan for the expansion of nuclear power, his own Nuclear Regulatory Commission was warning that the latest technology for housing nuclear reactors is far from safe. The Westinghouse design for the two reactors in Georgia that received the first loan guarantees announced by the president may not be durable enough to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes, or a direct airplane hit, the NRC stated.
Of course, we are now witnessing the growing natural disaster along the Louisiana coastline caused by the explosion of an oil drilling rig that boasted the latest “safe” technology.
It's understandable that the president felt he needed to make concessions regarding oil drilling and nuclear power to conservatives in Congress in order to gain their support for his proposed legislation dealing with climate change. But the disaster in the Gulf shows the price of that GOP support is too high to pay.
The president needs to rethink his plans for expansion of both off-shore drilling and nuclear power. We can't afford disasters in either of those realms, and we can no longer fool ourselves into thinking they can't happen.
Not an exact match, but similar. Beyond the similarities in fondness for certain damaging energy sources, there’s many other similarities – attacking unions, lack of CIA and NSA accountability, growing the federal debt, going after entitlements, hyper-protection of the hyper-wealthy, privatization of government services, etc.
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p>Hopefully the devastation of this oil spill will help those on the left to understand what we’re dealing with in the White House.
It may be off-topic for this diary, but your comparison between Reagan and Obama requires a response:
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p>(1) The Obama Administration has made health care a top priority, first signing the SCHIP expansion and recently, of course, extending health care coverage to 30 million additional Americans. The Reagan Administration did little on health care, other than joke about AIDS, the biggest emerging health crisis in the 1980s.
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p>(2) Under Obama, the tax system at least somewhat more progressive, by cutting taxes for lower-income Americans and raising them for wealthy people. Under Reagan, the tax system became much more regressive.
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p>(3) Obama appointed Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Reagan appointed Scalia.
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p>(4) Obama signed into law several key pieces of legislation, including the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, credit card reform, student loan reform, and many others that Reagan would have certainly vetoed.
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p>(5) The Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has moved forward with plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from both motor vehicles and stationary sources. The Reagan Administration’s first EPA administrator was Anne Gorsuch, perhaps the most anti-environmental EPA chief in the agency’s history.
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p>(6) Other regulatory agencies under Obama have witnessed a 180-degree shift from the Reagan-esque deregulatory agenda of the second Bush Administration (John Judis’s article on this is helpful). In short: the people running these agencies are competent, progressive, and actually believe in the jobs that they’re supposed to be doing.
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p>(7) This is all not to mention that while Reagan and Obama both inherited major economic problems, the economic crisis Obama faced was far larger. While we’ve got a way to go, the recession appears to be over (3 straight quarters of GDP growth), and the economy is no longer shedding jobs. This recovery is occurring much faster than the long, slow, and uneven economic recovery under Reagan.
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p>I could go on, but I’ll stop there for now. You may not like Obama’s performance, and think that he could have been more progressive, but please don’t compare him to Reagan. That you do suggests that you don’t quite realize what a mess Reagan made out of government in his time in office.
It already had a large majority in favor under Bush (who vetoed it) – not sure why Obama should claim credit.
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p>Healthcare was extended through bill which mandates payments to private health insurers, not only breaking two of Obama’s campaign promises, but doing virtually nothing to control costs. God knows what’s really in this 2,000+ page bill, but there’s certainly a damned good reason why Obama didn’t want it to take full effect until after his next election attempt, no?
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p>(2) Taxes were way more progressive under Reagan than anything that Obama has proposed.
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p>(3) Are you forgetting a few other of Reagan’s SCOTUS appointments?
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p>(4) Ledbetter and the student loan reforms are good. The credit card and other consumer protection is minimal – for example, usury is still legal. Glass-Steagall is still gone, and Obama doesn’t want it back.
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p>(5) I agree.
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p>(6) Drill, baby drill. With a side order of tripling guarantees for nuclear power plant funding.
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p>(7) Larry Summers. Larry Summers. The man who repeatedly savaged the Middle Class under Clinton, e.g., with job-obliterating almost-free-trade-with-China and total banking deregulation, is back in charge of economic policy. My understanding is that we now have $12+ trillion in tax money guaranteeing junk banker assets, with zero new regulations on how bankers operate – this is a recipe for catastrophe. In addition, the Wealthy Economy is doing better (a full 1% of GDP in banker bonuses last year!), but for the rest of us – not really. There has been zero attempt to stanch the bleeding of jobs to microwage countries. (But we are attacking teacher’s unions – yeah!) Median income has dropped steadily since the end of Carter’s presidency, and I don’t hear any real talk of reversing this.
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p>As far as I can tell, this is just a redux of Clinton’s “we suck a little less than the Republicans so who else ya gonna vote for, chumps!”, complete with the same cast of characters. There’s no demonstrated interest in reversing the assault against the Middle Class begun by Reagan. Fundamentally, Obama seems committed to extending the Reagan era.
(1) SCHIP Would Have Passed With Virtually Any President
That’s why Bush vetoed it, right?
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p>(2) Taxes were way more progressive under Reagan than anything that Obama has proposed.
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p>Yes, at the beginning of Reagan’s term. But not by the end. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I…
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p>(3) Are you forgetting a few other of Reagan’s SCOTUS appointments?
O’Connor, Rehnquist (J to CJ), Kennedy, and the Bork attempt? Because these are all more liberal than Sotomayor…
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p>(4) Obama didn’t repeal Glass-Steagal. And yes, charging interest on loans is still legal. Without it, no one would make loans.
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p>(6) You have a point on drilling. I’ll see your drilling and even raise you “clean” coal too. Nuclear power is better than oil and coal, so unless you can demonstrate that he is promoting nuclear power at the expense of renewables, this argument is BS.
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p>(7) Tim Geithener is in charge of economic policy.
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p> The government is going to end up making a profit on the bank bailouts.And there were regulations imposed on the banks that took that money, which is why they’re in a hurry to pay it off. President Obama is supporting financial regulation. It hasn’t happened yet because HCR was a bigger priority.
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p>Median household income is up by about $5k since 1979. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H…
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“President Obama is supporting financial regulation. It hasn’t happened yet because HCR was a bigger priority.”
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p>I think in fairness to Obama we have to give him some time, as Patrick suggests.
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p>Personally, I agree initial signs from his record in office are less impressive than his campaign promises. On the other hand, he has only been in office for a bit over one year. The next presidential election campaign will begin in about 18 months.
(1) SCHIP passed by a totally veto-proof majority, see http://www.themiddleclass.org/… It would have passed even if McCain had been elected and vetoed the thing.
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p>(2) Those tax numbers don’t include capital gains tax fun, which is most of the cash made by the wealthy. Bottom line is that, all taxes considered, the wealthiest Americans now pay 18% or so in total federal taxes vs. a far higher rate for the middle class, e.g., http://taxprof.typepad.com/tax…
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p>(3) I think we can agree that Sotomayor is no Stephens, but I agree that Reagan’s picks were to the right of Sotomayor (but to the left of Dim Son)
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p>(4) Please point out the part where I said that charging interest on loans should be illegal. Thank you!
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p>(6) Today’s nuclear power is dangerous. Think a Chernobyl-magnitude accident can’t happen here? Maybe you should check out the recent news story of an offshore oil well that seems to have done the impossible.
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p>(7)Timmy “give the AIG counterparties 100 cents on the dollar!” Geithner is awful as well, but Summers is the man: http://www.whitehouse.gov/admi…
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p>Median household income is up, but this is a poor figure to use here. Two problems:
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p>1. Over time, more people have gone to work per household to make ends meet.
2. It doesn’t control well for the incredible shift of wealth to the already-wealthy that occurred since Reagan.
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p>The best figure is median nonsupervisory earnings which looks at individual earnings, and only for the blue-collar jobs: http://www.stateofworkingameri…
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p>I hadn’t looked at this for a while, and was surprised by what I saw – while hourly wage peaked in the 1970s and declined steadily during Reagan, Bush and Clinton, it went up under Bush! I assume that this is because we lost a lot of low-income jobs to China so these jobs disappeared, however I also believe that total employment under Bush never reached the same level it had been at before the early 2000s recession, so those jobs just disappeared which increased the median.
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p>Oddly, weekly wages did continue to stay well below their 1970s peak – I guess people were working fewer hours.
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p>Details aside, it’s pretty clear that Obama, like Reagan, is a raging corporatist who has done very little to protect the average American vs. what he’s done to protect bankers and that crowd.
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p>I remember when Clinton was running roughshod over the Middle Class, deregulating banks and letting jobs get moved en masse to Asia. There was the same outcry against those Democrats who said that these were bad, bad ideas. I guess Mark Twain was right – history never repeats, but it rhymes.
(1) SCHIP passed by a totally veto-proof majority, but that’s no guarantee it would have under McCain. White House pressure can change a lot of votes.
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p>2) Those tax numbers don’t include capital gains tax, but including it wouldn’t advance your point unless you can show me what Obama’s done to lower cap gaisn taxes or make them less regressive.
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p>(3) So what was your point on #3? I’m a bit confused.
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p>(4) You said “usury is still legal” without any support for that claim. Given the overall tone of the post, it sounded like you were defining “usury” as “charging interest”. If I’m wrong, tell me what you meant.
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p>(6) Today’s nuclear power is safer than oil and coal. So, once again show me that Obama is promoting nuclear at the expense of renewables. If he’s promoting it at the expense of oil and coal, he’s doing the right thing.
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p>See the Concorde discussion below. The only thing BrooklineTom leaves out is that unlike the Concorde, we actually have had accidents with nuclear plants, so we do know the failure rate.
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p>(7)You can’t claim “Larry Summers is still in charge of economic policy” in a logically consistent way. Under Clinton, he was Secretary of the Treasury. Under Obama, that’s Geithner.
If Larry Summers is in charge of economic policy now, he wasn;t then. That would’ve been Gene Sperling or Laura Tyson. Figure out which position you think is in charge of the economy and then we can debate this further.
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p>Median household income is up, but this is a poor figure to use here. Yet it’s better than what you propose.
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p>Over time, more people have gone to work per household to make ends meet.
So we can use personal income instead. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P… It’s gone up by about $3,000 since 1980.
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p>It controls very well for the incredible shift of wealth to the already-wealthy that occurred since Reagan. It’s median income, not mean. So the person making more money than exactly 50% of Americans is richer than they were before. Sure, it’s possible that everyone poorer than this person is getting poorer and everyone richer than this person is getting richer. The opposite is also possible if we want to throw out hypotheticals. The reality is that even the poor are generally getting richer over time. The rich are getting richer at a faster rate than the poor are getting richer, but so what? A true progressive should be more concerned with whether everyone can eat three meals a day than whether Bill Gates can afford too many yachts. If a million more people can afford an extra meal each day and Bill Gates can afford an extra yacht every month, then society is still better off than before.
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p>One of the worst figures is median nonsupervisory earnings which looks at individual earnings, and only for the blue-collar jobs. I’ll give you the individual earnings point. But why should we count only blue collar jobs? I’d rather count only white collar jobs. Sound ridiculous? Yes, but no worse than your idea. If more people are able to move into management/white collar jobs and this causes median earnings to go up, why is that bad?
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p>Details aside? Doesn’t work that way. Details are the only way we can have a rational discussion. It’s not obvious that Obama is anything until you use details to prove it.
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p>Are we comparing Obama to Reagan or are we comparing Clinton to Reagan, or are we comparing Obama to Clinton? Your Clinton reference are getting confusing, and are irrelevant if we’re supposed to be comparing Obama and Reagan.
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Just because Obama is not the perfect antithesis of Reagan does not make him a twin of the Gipper…
There’s a pattern of Obama taking conservatives (and conservative corporate interests) at their word. It’s almost as though he’s been reading TIME and Newsweek for the past 20 years, and uncritically swallowed their “conventional wisdom” as historical truth.
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p>So, to beat Hillary, he & his supporters campaigned that he would rise above that conservative vs. liberal nastiness that slowed down President Clinton in the 1990s. And he and his team actually seemed surprised conservative activists put Hitler mustaches on his image and tried to disrupt the debate about Health Care Reform.
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p>He adopted Bob Dole & Bill Kristol’s healthcare ideas from 1994 and acted like Democrats could expect Grassley or Snowe or Collins to vote for it. The only time Dems have been able to get a moderate Republican to vote their way (when it mattered) is to get the moderate to switch out of the GOP (Jim Jeffords and Arlen Spector). Result: more wasted time and less real reform for healthcare.
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p>Then, in the face a need for climate change legislation, Obama unilaterally offers more offshore drilling, as though burning more carbon is going to reduce global warming, and takes the corporate word that drilling is “safe.”
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p>He could have started with the position that oil & gas companies are not paying America what they owe America for drilling on public lands. In addition to being true, it puts the other side on the defensive and gives him a better start at negotiations.
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p>There’s a very clear pattern of the conservative side exaggerating and lying to get what they want, even when they are the minority in Congress, but Obama, despite his Harvard education, seems to lack the critical thinking skills to anticipate and counter this strategy.
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p>His vaunted rhetorical skills only come into play when he’s let the other side put him in a must win situation.
When Obama embraced drilling to appease conservatives, I began to wonder if he had amnesia. How many times does he have to get whacked around before he figures it out?
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p>In fairness though, the Hitler mustaches are the trademark of the Lyndon Larouche cult…I’m not sure they’re conservative, or liberal, or anything other than nuts.
I view President Obama’s strategy differently.
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p>I think the effect of his drilling announcement was to take the drilling issue off the table — the Gulf blowout shredded what was left of it. I think he did for offshore drilling what Bill Clinton did for the similarly spurious “welfare mothers” and “liberals-are-soft-on-crime” claims.
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p>You may see, in President Obama, a president who “seems to lack the critical thinking skills to anticipate and counter this strategy.” I see a president who not only anticipated this strategy, but leveraged it to his advantage. I think we’re watching a master show us how political jujitsu works.
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p>You seem to see a man several moves behind the chess game. I see a man many moves ahead.
It is well-worth remembering the specifics of what we (or “they”) mean by the word “safe”.
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p>The Concorde was touted as the safest plane in the air — until it crashed, just once. It instantly became the most dangerous plane in the air. How?
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p>The air industry likes to publish safety statistics about “incidents per passenger mile.” That works pretty well for aircraft like the Boeing 737. There are thousands of flights per day (world-wide), incidents are rare, and so hundreds of thousands of people travel millions of miles without incident.
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p>Why were the safety claims of the Concorde so bogus? Because there were a handful of them. They didn’t make many trips (by industry standards), they didn’t carry many people, and — wait for it — the inevitable first crash hadn’t happened yet. Every kind of vehicle eventually crashes. Every piece technology eventually fails. It is a law of nature. The engineering questions are “when” and “what is the impact.”
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p>When the first crash of the Concorde happened, the safety record instantly went from “perfect” to “abysmal.”
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p>The Concorde was never safe, in comparison to conventional aircraft. The cascade of faults that brought it down had been there from the beginning. It appeared to be safe only because of a statistical quirk in how the public (and regulatory agencies) measure safety.
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p>I suggest that the same is true for oil rigs and nuclear power — especially nuclear. The sample size that we draw our inferences from is small. As we are learning the hard way in the Gulf, the consequences of a failure are catastrophic.
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p>In my view, the problem we must solve is our utterly out-of-control energy consumption. More allegedly “safer” drilling rigs aren’t the answer, and more nuclear plants aren’t the answer (even if we could build them fast enough, which we can’t).
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p>The answer is to find ways to reduce our energy consumption, while we simultaneously shift to renewable sources (like solar). The blowout in the Gulf will cost the world billions of dollars. The return on that money, like the return on the trillions of dollars we’ve squandered in Iraq, would have been far far greater if we had invested it in solar.
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p>I really do wonder just how hot the water has to get before we frogs start to jump out of the beaker.
…because I would in fact reach the opposite conclusion. Even before I saw your comment I was thinking this mentality sounded like the person who refuses to ever fly again because of one plain crash. The Concorde might not fly as often as a standard Boeing 700 series, but there were still enough flights I’m sure to say one crash out of x number of flights is a pretty decent record. I think the jury is still out on nuclear and I prefer it to fossil fuels, especially when we take into account routine environmental impact. Oil on the other hand is dirty even when everything goes right. Accidents happen and we while we should learn from them to improve prevention we should never use a single or very occasional high-profile disaster as a reason to throw out the method entirely.
There’s some really cool statistics and Markov chain work in failure theory. Depending on the circumstances, a single failure can tell you quite a bit about the rate of future failures.
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p>Furthermore, an analysis of the failure itself may demonstrate that the problem was exceedingly bad luck (combination of a faulty install, a rare event like a black swan, etc)… or the failure analysis may demonstrate that all the other agents (in this case Concorde airplanes) are equally susceptible. I have no idea what the Concorde analysis showed, I’m merely pointing out that sometimes a single failure is enough data to show that the all use should cease.
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p>As for “the jury” and nuclear, that’s simply no good. The cost of failure is massive — so we’d better be damned certain that there won’t be a failure… “the jury still out” is simply not good enough.
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p>
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p>Never use a single or very occasional high-profile disaster? So how many disasters do we need to stop wreaking massive death and destruction?
My read of the various analyses (such as this) is that every Concorde was equally susceptible, because the failure chain was part of the design. I think the decision to ground the airframe reflects this.
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p>The crash began with a tire blowout. This was not the first for the aircraft. The Concorde is heavy. In this fatal flight, it was slightly overloaded. The overweight condition forced even higher takeoff speeds than normal, and narrowed the margin for a safe abort.
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p>By design, the Concorde had much higher V1 (commit) and Vr (rotation) speeds than conventional aircraft. The Concorde was designed to take off without flaps (allowing the flaps to be much lighter).
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p>The higher takeoff speed meant the tires were spinning faster. That, in turn, caused debris to fly off at significantly higher speeds.
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p>The fuel tanks were immediately over the landing gear. The engines were close to the fuel tanks, in the fuselage. When the debris from the blown tire struck the bottom of the aircraft, it caused a fuel leak. The engines caused the leaking fuel and then the fuel tanks to catch fire, and the aircraft was doomed.
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p>Conventional aircraft take off more slowly because they use flaps. A pilot therefore has more time (and runway) to abort. Tire blowouts are relatively common, and on conventional aircraft are not nearly so dangerous. Fuel tanks on conventional aircraft are further away from the engines. When conventional engines catch fire (they do), it is generally not catastrophic to the airframe.
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p>The Concorde was, by conventional standards, an unsafe airplane. That’s why it was grounded.
It wasn’t something flying off the Concorde that ruptured the tire, it wasn’t rotational speed exceeding the capacity of the tire, it was because there was debris on the runway.
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p>Methinks the plane was grounded because it was unprofitable.
A piece of debris from an earlier departure ruptured the tire. That should not have been enough to cause this crash.
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p>Here’s the connection to the points I cited:
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p>1. The tires on the Concorde spin faster because of the increased V1/Vr (in this case, the plane was also overloaded — raising the takeoff speed even higher). Because the wheels spin faster, the debris flies off with more kinetic energy. The increased kinetic energy of the debris means that the debris does more damage when it hits the airframe.
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p>So while I agree that rotational speed did not exceed the capacity of the tire, that wasn’t ever the claim. The runway debris caused the blowout — the high rotational speed of the wheel caused the debris from that blowout to do more damage, and the damage from that blowout debris caused the fuel tank rupture and subsequent airframe loss.
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p>2. The design of the Concorde — no takeoff flaps or slats, higher speeds, etc. — lengthened the amount of runway needed for each departure. This, in turn, meant that the aircraft was more likely to strike runway debris because the wheels cover a longer area of runway. In this episode, the fragment that caused the blowout (from a prior departure) was on a section of runway beyond the rotation point of a conventional aircraft. The Concorde hit the runway debris because it required a significantly longer takeoff roll.
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p>Yes, the plane was grounded because it was unprofitable. It was unprofitable because the design changes needed to regain certification were prohibitively expensive.
… that the tire blowout alone caused the airframe damage and not the non-tire debris (either from what was on the runway or from the Concorde’s non-tire gear components)?
In the detail pages of the investigation, the evidence convinced the investigators that the accident was caused by the blowout alone.
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p>Here are the excerpts that persuade me:
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p>1. Pieces of tyre (sic)
Piece of tyre at Slab 180 level Piece of tyre at Slab 152 level
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p>2. Piece of Metal
Piece found at Slab 152 level
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p>3. Structural Element
Part found at Slab 160 level
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p>My read of the report is that the metal strip (2 above) slashed the tire. The chunk of fuel tank (3 above) suggests that the tank was spewing fuel (presumably from the tire debris) that the engines subsequently ignited — bringing down the plane.
…is exactly why you learn from them, but not reason to throw them out. I believe the French have used nuclear power safely. I guess I’m not as risk-averse as you. There are a lot of progress we never would have made if we adopted the “can’t afford a single failure” mentality. I obviously know that Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have happened and I am still comfortable with nuclear power.
Even if nuclear accidents weren’t catastrophic (they are), even if we knew how to properly dispose of nuclear waste (we don’t), there’s still the teensy facts that they cost double or triple the cost to build than traditional power plants, infinitely more expensive to staff and maintain those facilities over the length of time they have to be staffed (bear in mind that while nuclear facilities create electricity for 60 years, they have to be staffed and maintained for 120 years because of the nuclear hazards) and, perhaps most importantly, even if all those other problems could be solved (they can’t), at current rates of usage, there’s only enough mine-able uranium on this planet for 100 years. Build more plants and we’ll run out sooner.
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p>So, yeah, the jury’s still out… if the jury has rocks for brains. I’m not going to say there’s no place for nuclear energy on this planet, but its use should be very, very limited (existing facilities, until they can be safely retired, the Navy, perhaps future missions to Mars… LOL). Suffice it to say, nuclear power cannot and will not be any sort of means to tackle climate change in this country or across the world. Not only would it fail miserably in that role, but they create more problems than they solve.
5 for the content, 4 for the title of this comment. I never suggested it was a panacea, but I’d still take it over fossil fuels anyday.
as I said, it doesn’t solve a single, solitary problem — just causes new ones. Every dollar invested in new nuclear energy is worse than flushing it down the toilet — it could be the dollar that causes the next nuclear disaster, and it’s certainly a dollar that would have been much better spent on wind, solar or efficiencies.
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p>In light of all the points I brought forward, I’d like to know why you’d take nuclear over fossil fuels and why you think it could even be a choice (it couldn’t — because, as I said, it can’t possibly be a solution even if we wanted it to and could miraculously solve all its problems).
…but from everything I have heard and read it definitely seems like nuclear is preferable to oil and coal (don’t know about natural gas). My understanding is that nuclear waste can be safely stored and doesn’t take that much space. I’m not going to go tit for tat with you as I don’t pretend to be an expert and I doubt you are either and I suspect that like casinos you’ll present your facts and I’ll say OK I can live with that. You make good points; just please respect that others might draw different conclusions. I’m just saying if I had to choose between only the oil or nuclear I’d take nuclear without hesitation. If the question is do we invest limited resources on nuclear or wind/solar then I’ll take wind/solar, again without hesitation.
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p>You argue without the facts. There isn’t enough mine-able uranium in the world to even make a dent in the amount of fossil fuels we use. If you don’t think you know enough information to form an opinion on an issue, don’t form an opinion — but you have the nasty tendency to form opinions on issues, assuming all sides are somehow equal, without the facts.
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p>That’s just not true. There have been numerous accidents with nuclear waste, some even in America. We do not know how to safely store waste indefinitely, and for the moment even low-level waste has to be under guard at the institution for roughly a century before it no longer has to be fully staffed.
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p>I doubt we can even calculate how expensive it will be to store nuclear waste indefinitely — and it will always be a risk, one that will inevitably blow up in our faces at some point, especially given the fact that this waste is often radioactive for thousands of years. Allowing humankind to create nuclear power plants is a little akin to asking an infant what it wants to do for the rest of its life and then holding that infant responsible for that decision for as long as it lives.
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p>Uranium is merely the easiest to work with, but by no means the only material with which to make a reaction: the sun has been using only hydrogen and helium for millions of years…
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p>Nor should we… The problem with the waste product is that it is ‘radioactive’: that is to say, it is ‘leaking’ energy. Hmm… energy? Yes. Energy. To date we’ve been spoiled with our sense of the disposable. But surely there is some process, either nuclear, atomic or chemical that can either make use of that energy, or be used to convert it into something of greater value to us.
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p>Nature, it is certain, provides no such thing as ‘waste’. We are slowly learning this simple, salient, fact.
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p>Infancy is a theme here: our knowledge of nuclear power is in its infancy; and our attitude is akin to asking nothing of the infant whatsoever beyond what we can exploit.
I shudder to think of the difficulties, risks, and injustices associated with using other transuranics to power fission reactors.
… and thus ‘easiest’ to knock into a fusion reaction. Kinda like you’ll get a higher bowling score if the pins you are aiming at aren’t all that stable and fall over in even the slightest breeze…
You are an all-knowing policy wonk apparantly and we need those. I’d be better at it too if I were a full-time legislator and researching were part of my job. (BTW, can I assume that though you mentioned wind and solar, water would be OK with you too as it is also natural and renewable?) Lets focus on what we do agree on and prioritize those things. I often have to tell people that they are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts; with you I often have to remind you we are entitled to our own opinions based on those same facts. You have to understand that I read and hear things from time to time that if you really think I missed something fine, but I can’t source something that I got from maybe a perfectly credible source, but it was months ago. I don’t retain those details and I regret that you can’t accept that. So, please correct my information when appropriate, but lose the attitude. You do NOT have all the answers either.
and I don’t care about trivial opinions that don’t make an impact on the lives of others, but when people choose to support issues that can do harm to the earth and/or society, I’m not going to pat them on their virtual backs online and tell them that’s okay. I used to have more patience, but years of writing online has hardened me to internet communication.
I see it as primarily a discussion forum where people mostly not experts can bat around ideas. You seem to want more of a policy seminar with facts and figures. There’s no correct answer to that tension. To be honest the reason I often don’t present facts is because I’m not disputing them in a lot of cases. I simply draw different conclusions from them. Please be aware that not everybody researches everything as intensely as maybe you do, and even if they did it IS sometimes possible to come up with opposite opinions from the same facts.
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p>In all seriousness, though, we all view the interent and blogosphere in a different lense. While it is largely a device for communication and media, I view it through the lense of an activist. That’s why I push people, maybe a little hard sometimes. (What kind of an activist would I be if I didn’t?) It doesn’t mean I don’t like you or am trying to be mean or something… I actually enjoy our conversations, Chris đŸ™‚ Don’t take them too personally…
…is that the graphic you used didn’t load:)
First..
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p>And then..
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p>”cascade of faults”?? It hit a piece of metal left from a plane that had taken off previously… A tire rupture, as a result of hitting this metal, sending pieces into the wing, severing cables and stressing a fuel tank which subsequently burst… Hardly seems a ‘cascade of faults’ to be pinned comprehensively upon Concorde.
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p>An operational lifetime spanning Mach numbers and lasting nearly twenty five years (at the time of the crash) without an incident is an excellent record. The concerns, such as they were, had to do with the aging of the fleet and the economic feasibility of continuing to service them…. the laws of diminishing returns promised more expensive upkeep for less and less reliability. Long hoped for replacements never materialized: the planes flew profitably on a per-run basis, but had extremely high development costs that scared away potential investors.
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p>So the Concorde was the safest plane in the air for nearly 27 years: It was an incredible piece of engineering that weathered stresses other planes could not handle. Without building replacement planes, however, that record had to come to a close as the existing fleet aged.
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p>The Concorde was, in many ways, a victim of its own success: rather than becoming a standard part of daily aviation it was, eventually held captive by the leisure class, who could afford to use it and lease it (the flight that crashed was a chartered affair…) and did so, giving it a certain cachet. After 9/11 and increased restrictions on airports, when curb-to-cabin times went from minutes to hours, less and less people were willing to brave the hassles for what, essentially, had become leisure time…
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p>But to get back to the point at hand:
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p>There is a reason that nuclear plants (in addition to airplanes) are given worthiness and safety certification scoped by time limits. Parts age. Metal fatigues. So things are safe. Right now, you are safe to drive. As you age and your eyesight dims and reaction times slow you too will become less safe. That’s why I plan on grandkids: I’ll have somebody to drive me around as they scope out nursing homes for me… =-0
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The Concorde was not safe by conventional standards. See my comment above.
Although I by-and-large agree with you about oil, I have to politely disagree about nuclear. It’s worth pointing out that that the accident everyone cites, Chernobyl, occurred because the geniuses operating the plant decided to run a safety test: they turned off all the safeties to see what would happen. The plant also had a flawed design, in that it was
possibleto turn off all the safeties.<
p>There’s some very interesting work being done with new reactor designs, like uranium hydride, that are literally meltdown-proof. Not won’t-have-a-meltdown-if-it-works-right, but meltdown-proof: in the case of uranium hydride, the uranium is alloyed with hydrogen, which is a neutron moderator. If the reactor overheats, the hydrogen separates from the uranium and starts absorbing neutrons, slowing the reaction and cooling the reactor down, without any intervention, human or mechanical, at all. These systems aren’t ready for deployment yet, but they could be ready soon, with the proper investment.
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p>I don’t know if nuclear power is a good idea, but my concerns have less to do with safety and more to do with capital costs and start-up time. It takes a long time and a lot of money to build reactors, and in the time it would take to actually build enough nuclear plants to make a difference, the cost of solar and wind might have fallen to the point where the new reactors are too expensive to operate.
For every significant nuclear accident there is a cause that looks stupid in retrospect. (Usually that is stupid period.)
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p>The cause of Three Mile Island is usually given as a combination of equipment failure and human error, though some have suggested the errors include errors of engineering. The Browns Ferry fire happened when someone decide to check for leaks with a candle flame.
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p>So when you say, Ah, those ninnies at Chernobyl, we don’t do that!–you are drawing the wrong conclusion. Because when something goes wrong at these facilities, it’s because something went wrong, and there’s always a specific reason. But the generic reason is human error, cutting corners, stupidity, whatever–these are endemic to the human condition.
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p>So an alternative conclusion might be to avoid technologies that (1) do not tolerate error and for which (2) the price of error is unacceptable.
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p>A failure of (1) without (2) might be okay, and the normal probabilistic assessments of risk can apply. (1) and (2) together should mean it’s dead out, even if the odds of the error are very low, because the result is unacceptable.
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p>I quite agree that capital costs and start-up time are sufficient considerations, but unfortunately Congress and President Obama are contemplating an end run around those issues and the market discipline they represent.
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p>Disease, ignorance and criminality are also endemic to the human condition. No one yet suggests we throw up our hands in dismay at these things: we do not stop the progress of medicine, education nor the police due to the intractable, not to say incorrigible, nature of the human animal.
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p>You are arguing against yourself here. Tolerance for error was precisely the reason TMI was not as bad as Chernobyl. Much nuclear reactor/plant design is highly tolerant of error. Chernobyl was a case of bad design, bad management and bad processes combining to catastrophic effect: it is not, however, representative of the nuclear industry as a whole. They really were ninnies.
No, I think I am arguing with you. If arguendo TMI was better designed than Chernobyl (chiefly by its having a containment), that still does not mean that it was good enough.
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p>”Not as bad as Chernobyl” has got to vie with “not as dirty as Exxon Valdez” and “not as toxic as plutonium” for damning with faintest praise ever. (And do you really mean to argue that we should cheer Three Mile island’s design and operation?)
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p>The point was it’s better not to proliferate technology that cannot tolerate human foibles (with disproportionately catastrophic consequences).
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p>This prudent guideline bears no resemblance to your parliament of strawmen who are foolishly against medicine, education, and law because people are so sick, ignorant, and lawless.
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p>Really, petr, its obvious we disagree, but how can we have a discussion if you are going to drag in stuff like that? You know, from my point of view it is nuclear power that sits athwart the path of human progress to a better world.
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p>The argument that Chernobyl was a special case because of its unique circumstances is no different that the argument that Bhopal was a special case because of its unique circumstances–or TMI–or the Fermi accident–or the Browns Ferry fire–or BP in the gulf. It is a psychological distancing technique that industry uses to justify business as usual and well-meaning folk use to avoid thinking about the unthinkable.
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p>There’s always a specific error in the disaster someplace, which reassures some people but which is actually exactly the point.
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p>Chernobyl had containment. Poor design, bad management and inferior quality prevented safe operations.
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p>It’s obvious, however, that nothing will be, for you, ‘good enough’…
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p>Excluding actual weaponry, the amount of people who have been killed and or injured by nuclear power is insignificant when compared to injury and deaths in even the mining of coal. If you add oil extraction it becomes tragic. It approaches farce when you factor in the injuries and deaths associated with the wholesale deposition of emissions into the atmosphere… Whether from coal or oil. This doesn’t even count actual deaths and injuries resulting from the direct us of oil: more people have died, worldwide, of car crashes in the last week than have died as a direct result of Chernobyl.
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p>How do you measure ‘catastrophe’? I guess that since it doesn’t all happen at once, you’re cool…
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p>If you factor in even the worst case estimates of Chernobyl related deaths we’re still not even close to cigarette deaths as a result of Marlboro alone.
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p>Your entire argument presupposes, merely for the sake of convenience, that what we are presently doing is somehow safer, or indeed, wholly different from what we wish we might do. This is not so. We’ve been storing our toxic waste in the atmosphere for centuries… At least with nuclear waste we can entomb it in sarcophagi. To date we’ve not even done half so much with toxic emissions. To my way of thinking, heedless dispersal into the atmosphere is a slow motion, creeping disaster of far grander proportions than even Chernobyl and a lot more dangerous than entombment. This is an improvement, at the very least, in awareness and effort…
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p>As I’ve been at points to point out, it is nuclear power, in the form of the sun, that makes a world, better or worse, possible at all. From the point of view of both science and aesthetics nuclear power is a far far better use of materials than hydrocarbons. If you disassociate the cold war distrust and anxieties bred into the boomers there isn’t even a question.
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p>You are the one arguing that Chernobyl is the general case, not the corner case… No one is arguing that Toyotas are a general case of deficient auto manufacturing: it is because of the specific instances of Toyota processes and engineering that they have specific problems. Same with Chernobyl…
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p>Duh. Do you somehow think that I might wish to make a study of accidents, errors and the decision making process as a mere effort to ameliorate some emotional distress? Do you suppose that my commitment to nuclear power derives from unthinking consumption of corporate talking points?
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p>Or, perhaps, maybe, could it be, that the desire is to understand and mitigate disasters… ? Hm? Maybe?
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p>It is possible to avoid encasing our specific errors in cement (like Chernobyl) and entirely possible to be disciplined, smart and motivated enough to build fault tolerant systems (like TMI) and that’s the point.
Everyone talks about Chernobyl… because it was a fraking disaster. Unfortunately, not enough people are talking about the very real and present problems with countries that are “good” at nuclear energy. I agree with you about the problems with capital costs and start-up time, but to ignore the environmental catastrophes that can and will happen again with these facilities eventually (Murphy’s law) is a catastrophic mistake. It could be an earth quake, it could be a terrorist attack or it could be an accident, but we’re going to get another Chernobyl eventually and probably sooner than we’d all like to admit.
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p>Finally, the idea of “meltdown proof” nuclear facilities is a farce; at least by 1912 we learned indestructible is never really indestructible, and even if it were, there are a whole host of other potential disasters regarding nuclear energy production that don’t involve nuclear meltdown at the facility — transport, waste storage, etc. None of these risks are worth the rewards, especially given the fact that the costs alone — even without the potential of environmental catastrophe — outweigh the benefits.
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p>Coal, petroleum and ‘natural’ gas all have their origins in organic materials that, millions of years ago, fed off the sun. Wind is created by pressure differentials created by atmospheric temperature differentials, in combination with geography, derived from changing exposure to the nearest star, our sun.
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p>The only exceptions to this are chemical (batteries, either hydrogen or more the prosaic handhelds we have) and nuclear power, which, coincidentally, is the same power occurring in the sun. Now, it is certain that respect is often insufficient when paid towards the sheer amount of power available to us, and that waste is an issue, but that’s not a reason to say that the risks are not worth the rewards.
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p>I think that the key will be waste: once we discover the appropriate cycles for dealing with radioactive substances (which substances, after all, are merely another form of energy…) we’ll be good. We’ve been spoilt by our mentality of ‘disposability’… as if there is really such a thing as ‘waste’…. after all, dead rotting trees, once surely viewed as ‘waste’, turned into hydrocarbons in only a matter of a few million years… surely, with a little elbow grease and a few thousand PhDs working the problem we can do better, no?
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p>So the answer, once again, is to throw great thumping piles of money at the scientists and engineers… study study study!
but you’re wrong.
No, the Sun runs on fusion; nuclear power reactors use fission.
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p>Generally, your argument that all power derives from the Sun is not useful, even if true. If we’re going to throw great thumping piles of money at an energy source, I’d prefer that it be a source that doesn’t have enormously long-lived toxic byproducts. I’d prefer that even if the ultimate source of the energy is the Sun.
…two forms of NUCLEAR power… And you might want to re-read what I have to say about our understanding of nuclear power being in it’s infancy…
Actually, we know how to eliminate nuclear waste now, at least in theory, it’s just prohibitively expensive. You burn it with fast neutrons-basically, fission it again and again until it’s decomposed into isotopes that are either stable or have half-lives shorter than a day. This is an endothermic reaction; it costs far more energy than is produced. How much energy? I’m not sure-I’m not a physicist, I just read a lot.
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p>You need fast, high-energy neutrons to do this, which is why it’s so expensive. There are relatively few ways of producing fast neutrons-options include uranium fission (which would just produce more waste), particle accelerator reactions (which would basically require building scaled-down versions of the LHC), and deuterium-tritium nuclear fusion. At present, all of these options are more expensive than burying the stuff. Also, you might end up using more energy to dispose of the waste than you got from the original fission reaction. The price of neutron generation is falling, however, and it may ultimately be a practical method of disposing of nuclear waste. It might be practical in five years, it might be in forty, it might never be practical. We don’t know.
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p>We do not, as yet, know of the cause(s) underlying the accident in the Gulf. So we can’t say, for certain, that inherent safety concerns are at play here. I don’t say this to minimize safety concerns, but to remind us that regulatory concerns are often of equal importance. Both Chernobyl and TMI would have been prevented by adherence to regulation.
What a ridiculous excuse to attack nuclear power.
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p>It’s popular right now to compare the BP spill to Three Mile Island, and yet there is basically no comparison. Even though Three Mile Island was our nation’s worst nuclear disaster, its environmental impact was small and extremely localized.
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p>Nobody was killed. Nobody was injured. Power production resumed six years later with no ill effects. Some people who lived downwind went to court over the negligible levels of radiation they received… and thus they sat in a granite courthouse that emitted levels of radiation higher than those they were complaining about.
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p>And that was a meltdown. The design you are scaremongering about can’t melt down any more than a windmill can.
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p>Your selective quote about the Westinghouse design was that it “may not be durable enough to withstand” various disasters. You phrase it in such a way that you imply “and then it’s going to blow up and kill everyone omg”. Put the statement back in context and you’ll realize how mild it is. Your house may not be durable enough to withstand being hit by an airplane either.
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p>Meanwhile, fossil fuels are an ongoing environmental disaster. The BP spill is poisoning the entire Gulf of Mexico, possibly to the extent of 45 Exxon Valdez spills. Individual mining disasters (think of mine collapses, long-burning mine fires, and those intentional disasters known as mountaintop removal) cause more harm to people and the environment than any American nuclear plant. Fossil fuels also spew their deadly waste into the air and water, as opposed to nuclear waste, all of which is placed into sealed barrels.
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p>When you quote nuclear scientists out of context to fight against their technology, you are no better than Republicans ranting about “Climategate”. You can’t solve the fossil fuel problem by replacing science with politics.
Are all around us, as a society we need energy and cannot survive without. I do think some of the new Nuke power plant designs may be both cost effective and fail safe. There are even designs which reuse the waste. The last plants built in the US were designed in the 1970’s think how technology has changed in the past 40 years. Think of the difference between an 1970 car and a 2010 car.
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p>My cousin came very close to being killed after being hit by a renewable resource vehicle a logging truck. I’ve had family in a refinery when it blew up (he is fine). I don’t know of anyone hurt by a nuclear plant.
and for what you think may be the qualities of new nuclear power plant designs. I will be sure to give those points the weight they deserve when thinking about approaches to power generation. Likewise, I will give all due weight to the history of claims that one or another apparently risky process was State Of The Art, and therefore safe. I have personal anecdotes about some of those myself, but I won’t bore you with them.
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p>The whole and entire discussion, I take pains to remind you, arises out of our decision to store the waste, in the form of emissions, from our present sources of energy, in the atmosphere.
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p>Problem: Atmospheric storage of carbon, as a byproduct of energy production, has lead to increased global temperatures and an unstable global climate. Side effects include increased acidity in rain.
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p>Proposed Solution: Use an energy source with a less lethal waste byproduct: Nuclear.
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p>That’s right: for all its danger and lethality, nuclear waste is far more tractable and is stored with much much less globally significant impact…
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Apply the subsidies that more nukes would require to be competitive to PV solar. Subsidize the erection of solar panels on every flat or South-facing building roof, and create an energy-generating system with NO toxic waste, beyond its initial manufacture.
… that, should we cover every last available inch of flat-n-south it would be sufficient…
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p>Though, if it were sufficient, I grant the optimality of the solution… Though tangent to the discussion: since we were discussing the problems of nuclear energy, which problems I’ve pointed out are similar in nature to the problems of fossil fuels.
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what the original post characterized as both oil and nukes being dirty. Your defense of nukes amounts to saying “this bad thing is better than that bad thing.” OK, stipulated. What I am saying is we don’t have to choose either of those bad things, because there are good things available. Let’s use those.
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p>My defense, such as it is, derives from anger at those making the statement that the possible risks of nuclear are ‘unacceptable’ all the while accepting the far graver, and demonstrably real, problems of hydrocarbons.
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p>I do not think that nuclear is a bad thing. I do not think that replacing oil with nuclear is replacing “this bad thing” with “that bad thing” as much as it is replacing “this failed process/mindset” with another mindset… Oil (and coal) is dangerous and dirty as a direct consequence of how we make use of it: there’s no getting around it. Nuclear is only dirty if we chose to make the same mistakes. We have, I believe, the options to do things differently and the technology to do them well.
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p>I do not think that wind and solar ought to be wholly supplanted by nuclear. I think that as much money as we throw at nuclear, that’s how much we ought to throw at wind, and an equal amount at solar. Political realities being what they are, I realize the difficulty in this… but it is, after all, what it is…
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p>But the primary goal, overriding all others, ought to be immediate and effective withdrawal from oil: the really truly unacceptable and dirty energy which has already created a true catastrophe.
in what technologies we have for dealing with nuclear waste. That waste is what makes nukes a dirty energy source.
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p>As I said, nuclear is ultimately a dead end. This source estimates that we’ll run out of Uranium by 2144 at current rates of use. Building a lot more nuclear plants would accelerate that, I’d think. Renewable energy isn’t going to run out. That same website says that Europe plans to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Where’s our plan?
substantiate your impressive statistic, or is it just made up?
In 2008, the US derived a whopping 7% of its energy from renewable resources. Alas, nearly a third of that is derived from dams, which is not considered renewable by some environmentalists, and more than half is “biomass” which is a nice way of describing a trash incinerator, and is also not an environmental favorite. So that leaves us with
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p>So that gets you only 13% of the total renewable energy actually consumed, when renewable energy only comprises 7% of all energy consumed. Put another way, these technologies, lovely as they are, presently account for less than 1% of all energy consumed.
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p>So, if the industry booms at a historically unprecedented rate of growth– say it doubles every single year– in ten years, it still comprises less than 10% of total energy consumed.
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p>At least we can make a dent in that by forcing efficiency, except that efficiency improvements have never led to producing the same output with less energy, but to producing more output with the same, or more, energy.
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p>It isn’t going to happen. Under any non-miraculous scenario, renewable energy will not be anywhere near sufficient to meet energy requirements for quite a few decades to come.
do you support your 98.6% figure?
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p>As I already pointed out, Europe’s non-miraculous scenario has it getting 20% of its energy from renewable sources within 10 years, and that’s not even using most available solar panel sites.
This seems to be simply a hope for a miracle. When has any industry as capital intensive as energy grown at a rate so quickly as that? Even if they pour the resources in, it takes a long time to build design and manufacturing expertise that can be scaled up.
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p> Cape Wind–a seeming no brainer– has been grinding along for TEN years, and they still haven’t even started. How do you expect this to possibly have any impact on any kind of reasonable time horizon?
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p>Premises:
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p>1. Carbon emissions are causing causing a catastrophe so dire that it threatens huge portions of the entire human race with drowning, starvation, or dehydration, unless something happens to decrease the carbon emissions almost immediately.
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p>2. Renewable energy resources, starting from their presently existing base, simply cannot develop fast enough to cause significant reduction in fossil fuel use. Their point of beginning is just too small
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p>3.If (1) is true, then something other than renewable resources must be utilized to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels in the immediate term, so that renewable energy production can catch up.
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p> If one believes that climate change indeed poses such a catastrophic risk, then one ought to be in favor of ANY source of energy that can reduce carbon emissions. Any technology. Nukes, hydroelectric on any stream of flowing water in sufficient quantity. Wind, solar, geothermal, as fast as they can be built. Natural gas, if it improves over coal. Clean coal, if it improves over existing coal. Suspend NEPA, MEPA, and similar roadblocks for all of these projects, so that they don’t take decades to launch.
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p>But no, we prefer to pour resources into expanding wind and solar, which, under a perfectly rosy scenario, might comprise almost a fifth of all energy consumption by 2020, leaving the other four fifths to be filled by what? oil? coal? Rolling blackouts?
that you have said nothing in your last three posts to substantiate your 98.6%, or any of your other claims.
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p>I can hear you talking, but that hat obscures your face.
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p>Here’s another country planning to get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Miracles abound, it seems.
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p>Japan is putting solar arrays on all of its school roofs, as a part of its “plans to increase its installed solar capacity tenfold to 14GW in 2020 and fortyfold to 53GW in 2030, from the current 1.42m kilowatts”.
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p>Those countries are not doing anything that we could not also be doing.
There is precious little of it in your post, only industry talking points.
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p>Although the abject market failure of the industry ought to be enough to settle the debate, all the health and safety arguments apply as well.
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p>At the heart of your apologetic is the equation that says that (1) horrendous catastrophe times (2) very low probability equals (3) acceptable risk.
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p>That is a misapplication of probabilistic risk assessment because the size of the disaster, like that (potentially) of the BP disaster, is simply unacceptable.
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p>Your postulate is a hobsons choice: it lies in the space between an emergent industry (nuclear) with a small record of sensational failures and an entrenched industry (oil) with a large record of continued failure (global warming, acid rain, exploitation and extraction.) Anything that can be said against nuclear has been demonstrated against oil. What would you have us do?
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p>So to be absolutely clear: unless you are prepared to turn the lights out, and keep them out indefinitely, we will not be able to use wind and/or solar as replacement. Wind and solar, at best, will be mitigating forces. Another mitigating force will be increased efficiencies if we can discard our lackadaisical attitude towards freely available power.
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p>But we’re already at horrendous catastrophe. It’s here. We’re on the cusp of catastrophic climate change. It’s been in all the papers. What’s the difference between possibly ruining the planet with a dozen Chernobyls and actually ruining it through a coupla hundred thousand coal fired power generation plants?
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p>You seem to think we’re in a position to actually not make the decisions that were undertaken hundreds of years ago…
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p>OK. Turn the lights out then…
Why do you ignore the other, genuinely benign technologies for generating power? Solar, wind, hydro, tidal. Take the massive infusion of cash you want to hand over to the nuclear industry and invest it in those options. Nuclear is ultimately as dead an end as oil.
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p>I would give an argument about how benign hydro and tidal are and I’ve already stated that solar and wind, sadly, might not be sufficient. Would that it were. I do not agree that nuclear is dead. I think that, for all it’s problems, it remains our best solution. Certainly, on a straight up comparison between nuclear and coal/gas nuclear comes out rather far ahead.
I didn’t say nuclear is dead; I said it’s a dead end – because there’s a finite amount of fissionable material available, which is also the case with oil.
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p>Solar and wind might or might not be sufficient, but they are not going to be used up, and every bit of energy they supply is a bit we don’t need fossils or nuclear for. Combine them with other renewables and with more-efficient use, and we have a much smaller problem.
Nuclear fission is not clean, as it leaves uranium, plutonium, and other radioactive waste.
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p>Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, is clean, as it uses hydrogen as fuel and turns it into helium (and energy).
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p>This summer, the National Ignition Facility will be conducting experiments aimed at using a very powerful laser to cause fusion that produces more energy than the laser uses. We should all be rooting for the NIF experiment’s success, since it is an important step on the road to clean and abundant nuclear energy.
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p>TedF
Would be amazing. Wouldn’t that be a world changer.
Thank goodness the government is investing tax money in this kind of future infrastructure work! You agree, don’t you, RoarkArchitect? đŸ™‚
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p>TedF
Is a worthwhile investment. Commercialization, no then it just becomes pork barrel spending. Massachusetts should not be funding Evergreen Solar we are funding pork. Let the NSF or the department of energy make these decisions – not a politician.
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… and impossible with private money alone.