I always thought environmentalists got railed on for being pro urbanization. I must be too young to have seen it the other way. Cities are better for public transportation. People are closer to where they work so they don't have to use as much energy for transportation. That's the argument I've always heard.
I'm sort of an environmentalist - as much as a libertarian can be. I like GM and I like having the kiddies go to the big city for the same reason - habitat. GM means we can grow more food on less land, leaving more places to, say, replant the short-grass prairies (the most endangered ecosystem in North America). Kiddies leaving the farm means rural land prices drop, allowing Nature Conservancy to buy up old farms and plant said prairies. Same with bottomland forests, wetlands, long-grass prairies.
I'm also pro-nuke - if global warming is real, and I think it is, nuclear is literally the only solution to the China problem - what happens when 3 billion Asians want air conditioning? Either Nukes, Hydro (there's that habitat thing, again - dams kill everything in an ecosystem) or Coal and Gas(CO2, in spades). Wind isn't reliable, tides are a dream, and solar is too expensive.
I've occasionally voiced this in more environmental forums than here, and I'm starting to get support, slowly, when I do so. Lovelock and friends may be martyring themselves, but they are making progress just the same.
Population control, I figure, will take care of itself as the third world urbanizes and finds that 5 kids is a curse rather than a blessing in a modern developing economy.
I'm a supporter of nuclear power, but my wife is an extremely articulate opponent of it. She argues fairly convincingly that there is no accepted solution to the disposition of the waste. At least one of the reasons is purely political -- Yucca Mountain, perhaps geology's best answer, is located in a swing state. When every electoral vote counts, the voters of Nevada have a veto.
Jack, your wife is poorly informed. Jerry Pournelle pointed out a simple solution decades ago; turn the waste into glass blocks, then find a place to stash them.
Or is it the "find a place to stash them" which she finds a problem? :)
Nuclear waste is entirely a political problem; technologically, it is a trivial matter.
The biggest canard is the stuff about how it "stays toxic for hundreds of thousands of years." Yes, and lots of chemical wastes stay as deadly as long or longer. So what?
If you are thinking about the nuclear power issue Read this
Author / Editor
Fuller, John G.
Title We Almost Lost Detroit
Publisher Reader’s Digest Press
City New York, NY
Date Published 1975
ISBN 0-88349-070-6
This book discusses the 1966 accident at the Fermi No. 1 fast metal breeder nuclear reactor in Detroit, Michigan, and the questions the accident raises for the use of nuclear power generation in the United States. The author describes the events at the accident. He stresses that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) estimated that any accident would be catastrophic, and that no insurance policy covered any people or equipment that might be involved in such an accident. He states that there was no solution to deal with radioactive waste accumulation, and that there were serious safety issues involved with many U.S. reactors. He also emphasizes that nuclear power plants were vulnerable to terrorists, and that the U.S. government had not allocated funds to research alternate forms of energy. The discussion is based on facts available at the time of publication, 1975.
Also, I spent some time in the early 90's at the Hanford reservation in Washington State trying to develop a lab sytem to record the test results of the contents of 177 leaking storage tanks of nuclear waste that were the product of 50 years of making bomb materials.
We have been considering the solutions to these problems for years. Guess what? they haven't been solved.
The stakes are very high in both directions. I can have lots of power at the risk of contaminating the world with long lived radiation or I can pollute it with emmisions. What do you want?
I'm also pro-nuke - if global warming is real, and I think it is, nuclear is literally the only solution to the China problem - what happens when 3 billion Asians want air conditioning? Either Nukes, Hydro (there's that habitat thing, again - dams kill everything in an ecosystem) or Coal and Gas(CO2, in spades). Wind isn't reliable, tides are a dream, and solar is too expensive.
I've occasionally voiced this in more environmental forums than here, and I'm starting to get support, slowly, when I do so. Lovelock and friends may be martyring themselves, but they are making progress just the same.
Population control, I figure, will take care of itself as the third world urbanizes and finds that 5 kids is a curse rather than a blessing in a modern developing economy.
Or is it the "find a place to stash them" which she finds a problem? :)
The biggest canard is the stuff about how it "stays toxic for hundreds of thousands of years." Yes, and lots of chemical wastes stay as deadly as long or longer. So what?
Author / Editor
Fuller, John G.
Title We Almost Lost Detroit
Publisher Reader’s Digest Press
City New York, NY
Date Published 1975
ISBN 0-88349-070-6
This book discusses the 1966 accident at the Fermi No. 1 fast metal breeder nuclear reactor in Detroit, Michigan, and the questions the accident raises for the use of nuclear power generation in the United States. The author describes the events at the accident. He stresses that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) estimated that any accident would be catastrophic, and that no insurance policy covered any people or equipment that might be involved in such an accident. He states that there was no solution to deal with radioactive waste accumulation, and that there were serious safety issues involved with many U.S. reactors. He also emphasizes that nuclear power plants were vulnerable to terrorists, and that the U.S. government had not allocated funds to research alternate forms of energy. The discussion is based on facts available at the time of publication, 1975.
Also, I spent some time in the early 90's at the Hanford reservation in Washington State trying to develop a lab sytem to record the test results of the contents of 177 leaking storage tanks of nuclear waste that were the product of 50 years of making bomb materials.
We have been considering the solutions to these problems for years. Guess what? they haven't been solved.
The stakes are very high in both directions. I can have lots of power at the risk of contaminating the world with long lived radiation or I can pollute it with emmisions. What do you want?