Tag: nuclear power

Nuclear power. :pause: Scaaaaryyyy nuclear power.

You know what the entertaining thing is about this article about entrepreneurs versus Green religious fanatics* on the subject of small nuclear power plants? …Nowhere does it mention that the US military has been working on reliable and more efficient nuclear reactors for longer than I’ve been alive.  How the heck did you think that the USS Gerald R. Ford was going to cruise around the Mediterranean, anyway?  A tow from Poseidon?

Seriously, you’d think that this would have come up. Contrary to the aforementioned religious fanatics, this is not quite new, untried technology.  Although possibly some of it might be ‘recently declassified.’

Moe Lane

*Guess which side I’m on!

Jeanne Shaheen caught lying about her opposition to nuclear power.

Rookie mistake.

Really and truly, she did claim that.

Because there’s this thing called YouTube now, you know:

Continue reading Jeanne Shaheen caught lying about her opposition to nuclear power.

#rsrh George Monbiot continues his descent into nuclear heresy.

Monbiot, as you may or may not recall, came to the conclusion earlier this year that anti-nuclear power hysterics were, well, anti-nuclear power hysterics who lie when it suits them and who have about as much intellectual credibility as you’d expect from a group of hardcore religious fanatics with a determinedly anti-science agenda.  Entertainingly, he’s still unbroken, half a year later, and is now ripping apart the anti-nuke crowd for peddling hideously overpriced radiation pills to Japanese affected by the Fukushima reactor meltdown (with a side order of conspiracy theorizing).  Yeah, I know: scum in human guise… but then, we were talking about the anti-nuclear power crowd, remember?  Those people get off on this sort of thing, particularly when it involves non-Europeans/Americans.

Via Samzidata, via Instapundit: I’m just going to add my usual note in these cases that while it may be personally satisfying to look upon the likes of a George Monbiot and righteously declaim “Too little, too late” – it’s much more satisfying to get the full conversion later*.  Or, if you prefer a more utilitarian argument: you have to reward appropriate behavior as well as punish inappropriate behavior.

Moe Lane

*Not to mention better for you in a moral sense.

Poor George Monbiot.

Yes, I’m guessing that you never thought that you’d ever read that meant in a more-or-less non-ironic fashion on a right-leaning website, given that the man is supposedly the inspiration for the word ‘moonbat.’ Still, the poor fellow’s going to have an unpleasant voyage of discovery. You see, George Monbiot has made a classic mistake of committing religious apostasy in public:

Over the last fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

…and in a fashion that is actually going to be hard for him to walk back*.  And he’s going to get hammered for it, too.  Continue reading Poor George Monbiot.

#RSRH QotD, A Heck Of A Thing To Hope For edition.

Glenn Reynolds, on whether the post-tsunami nuclear reactor problems in Japan will affect nuclear power development (such as it is) in the USA:

[T]his is a good argument for the several newer, inherently-safe nuclear designs. The good news: General Electric, which is joined at the hip to the Obama Administration, is big in the nuclear business. So corruption and interest may do the work that should be done by sound policy here…

Well, you go to establish energy independence with the President that you have, not the President that you want.

#rsrh Religious fanatics attacking job creation!

Of course, the religious fanatics are Greenies having heart palpatations over the thought of somebody actually daring to want to dig uranium – URANIUM! URANIUM! URANIUMURANIUMURANIUMURANIUMURANIUMURANIUM!!!!! – out of the ground – and the job creation is for the aforementioned uranium digging.  Those silly, silly non-Greenies.  Don’t they understand that their natural destiny is to get service-sector jobs?

Via Glenn Reynolds.  Who is about as respectful of these people’s motivations as I am; which is to say, not at all.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I know that mining can be messy.  Is this not why we have an EPA (created by a conservative President, you know) in the first place?  Besides, it’s not like we’re Commies, or anything.

Big Wind looking for federal handout.

The wind ‘industry’ is apparently looking for more federal aid – actually, no, there’s nothing apparent about it.  They want more federal aid, they want it permanently – and they want it specifically allocated to them, and not as part of a nebulous ‘alternate energy’ package.  Otherwise, they’re afraid that they’ll go out of business. For the record: if your business plan requires – not benefits from; requires – an annual bailout from the federal government in order to function, then by definition you have a bad business plan.  Mostly because you are not actually in business; you are a parasite pretending to be a business.  I understand that this point has been obscured since the Democrats took Congress in 2007, but it bears repeating.  A lot of repeating.

Now that we’ve got that lesson in Capitalism 090 out of the way, let’s clear something up.  It may be that the 112th Congress may find it expedient to take into account the Left’s religious sensibilities on ‘green’ power.  If so, however, a basic appreciation of this country’s secular ideals demands that the Left gives up blocking its favorite environmental devil figure.  I refer, of course, to nuclear power generation.  To put it very bluntly: if they want to get the angels of wind farms then they have to enthusiastically support the demons of nuclear power plants.  Note ‘enthusiastically:’ they’re going to have to actively and effectively oppose the antinuke scientific illiterates alongside the rest of us.  Because the USA is not going to reduce the amount of power that we generate every year if we don’t have to, and that is not negotiable.  The more reasonable green types need to accept that reality.

And if they don’t want to do that: well. I guess that they don’t really love Mother Gaia all that much, after all.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

What the ban on Yucca Mountain reminds us.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

I do like what Francis wrote, but I want to really drive it home to my people – which is to say, science fiction geeks. Let me strip this down for you. There was a quote that Jerry Pournelle likes to repeat, from one of the anti-nuclear power people: “The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax.“ Remember that one? Remember how it made you laugh at the idiot?

Well, did you vote for Obama? – because if you did, you voted for the guy who takes people like that idiot seriously.

And, do you know something? I told you so.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.