"Red" wrote in message
...
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
Actually, I did support nukular energy until I realized that's actually much
more polluting as far as carbon goes. Lots of people, including me, forgot
about all the mining, refining, processing required. It's not a panacea, and
it's only clean at the end of the process (not really though if you think
about the long-term storage requirements for the spent fuel rods).
I would certainly support fusion, but that's still many decades away.
--
"j" ganz @@
www.sailnow.com