Capt. JG wrote:
It's a huge problem that we're just starting to fully comprehend.
There's no
doubt about GW and human behavior causing it. There are really two
choices..
we can continue to pollute the environment and hope for the best, or we can
as quickly as economically and politically possible stop polluting and hope
for the best.

-- "j" ganz @@

Ok Jon,
One thing you *can* do to eliminate a very large amount of both air and
ground/water pollution including carbon emmissions, mercury, and CO2, is
to get your legislators to start supporting Nuclear energy. We still
burn an enormous amount of coal (and oil and esp. natural gas) in our
electrical generating plants, and coal is *the* most polluting substance
we can use for that purpose. Burning a carload of coal (about 20 tons)
will provide about 20 minutes of electricity in the average 1000
megawatt powerplant (that's the average turnover). Think about how much
coal that adds up to - we now burn about 1 billion tons of coal in the
U.S. to produce electricity. That alone produces 40 percent of all our
'greenhouse' gasses.

So why do we burn coal and not uranium? Ask your Patron Saint Against
America, Jimmy "I am an Idiot" Carter why he outlawed recycling spent
nuclear material. Just about all the countries that use nuc reactors are
now involved or are getting involved in recycling. And why? you might
ask... Because it drives the cost of generating electricity way down and
produces less waste and the waste generated is way less harmful and can
be reused by hospitals and industry. Ask why your (mostly Dem's - that's
the facts, you can look it up) legislators why they are always against
building more reactors when the rest of the developed world is
scrambling to open more (and yet they claim they want us off forign
oil). Ask them why the operating reactors here are generating so much
money that Connecticut's Governor has proposed a Windfall Tax on their
huge profits. You want cheap electricity? Get more reactors into the
competition. You want electric cars? Get more reactors online.
We build the world's safest reactors. Even the biggest nuc disaster in
the U.S., TMI (a human error accident no longer possible with the new
technology), leaked the same amount of radiation equal to a chest x-ray.
And that facility was old technology, the 4 new ones proposed
(vigorously opposed by your legislators) are state of the art, with many
more new-tech failsafe and safety items designed in.
So you want to bring up Chernoble? Ok, they had a meltdown of the carbon
rod seperators in theirs. We have never used that stupid technology, nor
would we have two teams of reactor operators fighting over the reactor
useage and actually cause the disaster to happen.
There is only one steel company now who can make the containment vessel,
a company in Japan. Not only have we lost that capapbility because of
our legislator's stupidity and greed (along with the jobs of course),
but that japanese company is backordered for at least four years with
foriegn orders. If (all) our idiot legislators cared about our well
being they would change that and we could re-claim the state of the art
manufacturing facilities and the jobs that go with them. But then, if
they didn't care more about their own careers more than us we would have
none of these issues now including the oil issue (we would be drilling
where the other countries are now going to do it off our coast).

So Jon, here's a challenge - get your legislators to give you a real
answer where they stand and what they are going to do - not their
bull**** answer meant to blow you off to get rid of pesky people who
dare to ask real questions. Pressure and pester them until you get them
to give this country what we really need - clean, cheap, safe energy.
BTW, the price of oil will plummet sharply if we changed over to nuc's
to generate all our power, so maybe you can get your pocketbook to call
your legislators.

Are you up for it?

Red