thunder wrote:
On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:18:12 -0400, Keith Nuttle wrote:


If the government had gotten behind a program to extract the energy out
of nuclear waste rather than bury it, we would have a clean, reliable,
continuously available, energy source with no concern about storing the
waste as there would be none.

The government? I thought "Free Market" was the Conservative mantra.
The program to recover the energy from nuclear waste will require
significant expenditure for the research and development. The only
organization with that kind of money is the government. With nuclear
energy it is basically a simple separation process to get the energy
components from nuclear waste. The engineering process will cost.

For the billions of dollars and significant effort that the government
spent in the last 40 years killing and avoiding nuclear energy, we could
have had a recovery process and had no energy problem today. Yet the
government is continuing to bury its head in the sand and promoting the
gimmicky sources of electricity like windmills, and other fanciful ideas
that will not work in the long run.

Do you resent the government spending money for cancer research? This
is an example of a major research project, that is beyond the scope of
private industry. While there have been some progress in this very
complex system, it is still not understood today.

I don't have to ask I know you are against space research, but this is
an example of a government program that has done good. There is not one
segment of society, today, that is not using something that came out of
that research. My wife and thousands of other people would be blind
today if the government had not spent research money developing lasers,
and the systems to guide (target) them.