"Palin looks likely this year to help drag John McCain's candidacy down to defeat..."

I do hope so, but always in the back of my mind are the voter roll purges in key states, and the corruptible electronic voting system, and even if Obama wins, I'm not convinced he's any friend of the environment.

We have a prevailing equivalent, whether or not it is mathematically accurate:
pro-business = anti-environment.

I can't imagine that all the corporate toadies lined up to build nuclear power plants, spray chemicals here and abroad, drill offshore, plant GMO crops, sell cancer protocols, will let a silly little election stand in their way.

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Renewable energy could 'rape' nature
11:10 25 July 2007
Downloaded from: NewScientist.com news service
NewScientist 1

NewScientist 2

Phil McKenna
Ramping up the use of renewable energy would lead to the "rape of
nature", meaning nuclear power should be developed instead.
Inderscience
So argues noted conservation biologist and climate change researcher
Jesse Ausubel in an opinion piece based on his and others' research.
NewScientist 3

Ausubel (who New Scientist interviewed in 2006) says the key renewable
energy sources, including sun, wind, and biomass, would all require vast
amounts of land if developed up to large scale production – unlike nuclear
power. That land would be far better left alone, he says.
Renewables are "boutique fuels" says Ausubel, of Rockefeller University in
New York, US. "They look attractive when they are quite small. But if we
start producing renewable energy on a large scale, the fallout is going to be
horrible."
Instead, Ausubel argues for renewed development of nuclear. "If we want
to minimise the rape of nature, the best energy solution is increased
efficiency, natural gas with carbon capture, and nuclear power."
'Massive infrastructure'
Ausubel draws his conclusions by analysing the amount of energy
renewables, natural gas, and nuclear can produce in terms of power per
square metre of land used. Moreover, he claims that as renewable energy
use increases, this measure of efficiency will decrease as the best land for
wind, biomass, and solar power gets used up.
Using biofuels to obtain the same amount of energy as a 1000 megawatt
nuclear power plant would require 2500 square kilometres of prime
Midwestern farm land, Ausubel says. "We should be sparing land for
nature, not using it as pasture for cars and trucks," he adds.
Solar power is much more efficient than biofuel in terms of the area of land
used, but it would still require 150 square kilometres of photovoltaic cells
to match the energy production of the 1000 MW nuclear plant. In another
example, he says meeting the 2005 US electricity demand via wind power
alone would need 780,000 square kilometres, an area the size of Texas.
Part of the land used in Ausubel's calculations is for storage and
transportation: "Any renewable energy supply needs a massive
infrastructure, including steel, metal, pipes, cables, concrete, and access
roads."

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As long as you keep messing around with wind, solar, geothermal and wave
power, the coal industry is safe. There is no way wind, solar, geothermal and
wave power can replace coal, and they know it. If you quit being afraid of
nuclear, the coal industry is doomed. Every time you argue in favor of wind,
solar, geothermal and wave power, or against nuclear, King Coal is happy.
ONLY nuclear power can put coal out of business. Nuclear power HAS put coal
out of business in France. France uses 30 year old American technology. So
here is the deal: Keep being afraid of all things nuclear and die either when [not
if] civilization collapses or when H2S comes out of the ocean and Homo
"Sapiens" goes extinct. OR: Get over your paranoia and kick the coal habit and
live. Which do you choose? I put quotation marks around "Sapiens" because it
is not clear that most of us have enough brains to avoid extinction when it is
clearly predicted and the safe path has been pointed out. Nuclear is the safe path.

PS: My numbers are correct. Nuclear is the cheapest and safest source of
electricity. Nuclear life cycle CO2 output is the lowest per kilowatt hour because
it takes a huge number of windmills or solar collectors or wave machines or
whatever to produce the same power as a nuclear power plant. All of those
windmills or whatever have manufacturing processes that make CO2. Hydro
power requires an enormous amount of concrete. The first step in making
concrete is heating limestone to drive off the CO2. That is one of the sources of
CO2 from hydro power. The price for electricity for the various sources of
power include the total life cycle costs. The cost to build the reactor is not much
different from the cost to build a coal fired power plant and the money comes
from the same source. See the next post of mine. Whoever would pay for
the reactor is the same person who would pay for the coal burner. LOOK at the
price for the electricity. It is the total life cycle cost. Nuclear is the cheapest and
the only full time replacement for coal. Nuclear power would be much cheaper
than it is if nuclear were allowed to be as unsafe as the other sources of power.
Nuclear power plants are self-insured. Tax money is NOT involved and would
not be mentioned if it were not for the civil disturbances caused by coal company
shills, alias protesters. The nuclear industry needs and deserves protection from
people who are obviously either mentally ill or very misinformed. When tax
money is mentioned with respect to nuclear power, the money is the extra money
that is wasted because of pointless protests.

I DO NOT work for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I am a retired
Department of the Army scientist and engineer.

There is NO SUCH THING as nuclear waste. There is fuel that is being wasted
for political reasons and because the coal industry has driven you paranoid. The
coal industry's reason for doing so is the $100 Billion per year cash flow they
receive as long as you remain in your present mental state. If you remain in your
present paranoid state and prevent the conversion from coal to nuclear, we all die,
as I said before. The cure for your present mental state is for you to go to
college and get a 4 year degree in a hard science [physics or chemistry] or
engineering, or for Americans to start acting like the French with respect to
nuclear power.

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the failed economy of today is the direct result of the economic policies of the democratic Clinton regime and Alan Greenspan, what happened in the late 90’s as far as the US economic policies is the main reason for the downrurn seen a decade later. Ecomnomies are not driven by changes made a year or two ago but a result of changes with repurecussions a decade later. Which is why, we are in this dire strait, due to the democratic socialist policies of Clinton which were put into play by one Alan greenspan

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"Power to Save the World; The Truth About Nuclear Energy" by Gwyneth
Cravens, 2007 Finally a truthful book about nuclear power. Gwyneth Cravens
is a former anti-nuclear activist.

Page 13 has a chart of greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production.
Nuclear power produces less greenhouse gas [CO2] than any other source,
including coal, natural gas, hydro, solar and wind. Building wind turbines and
towers also involve industrial processes such as concrete and steel making.

Nuclear power plants produce a total of 30 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour, the
lowest. This is the full life cycle CO2 output. There are no hidden CO2 outputs.

Wind turbines produce a total of 58 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour.

Solar power produces between 100 and 280 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour.

Hydro power produces 240 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour.

Natural gas produces between 439 and 688 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour.

Coal plants produce the most, between 966 and 1306 grams of CO2 per kilowatt
hour, the highest.

Remember the total is the sum of direct emissions from burning fuel and indirect
emissions from the life cycle, which means the industrial processes required to
build it. Again, nuclear comes in the lowest. Nuclear would produce even less
CO2 per kilowatt hour if the safety were lowered to the same level as other
sources of electricity. Switching from coal to nuclear is a 97% reduction in
electricity's 40% of our CO2 output. The refereed scenarios from the IPCC
failed to hold the CO2 down to 450 parts per million. You can't without building
something like 10,000 new nuclear power plants world wide to replace every coal
fired power plant on the planet. The 10,000 includes replacing all Generation 1
[Chernobyl style] power plants with safe American Generation 4 technology.
Let's get it done.

Page 211: In 2005, the production cost of electricity from:

nuclear power on average cost 1.72 cents per kilowatt-hour 1.00 times nuclear's
price. This is the full and total price. There are no hidden costs. There are no
subsidies. There are no tricks. 1.72 cents per kilowatt-hour is all of it.
[Supposed subsidies cover the cost caused by irrational protesters. That is a cost
of civil order, not a cost of nuclear power. The price would be lower if the safety level were lowered to equal other sources of electricity.]

from coal-fired plants 2.21 cents per kilowatt-hour 1.28 times nuclear's price

from natural gas 7.5 cents per kilowatt-hour 4.36 times nuclear's price

from oil 8.09 cents per kilowatt-hour 4.7 times nuclear's price

Wind fits in here.

solar in a sunny place 22 to 40 cents per kilowatt-hour 12.79 to 23.26 times
nuclear's price

American nuclear power reactors operated in 2005 around the clock
at about 90 percent capacity

geothermal plants operated at 75 percent capacity

coal-fired plants operated at about 73 percent capacity

hydroelectric plants at 29 percent capacity

natural gas from 16 to 38 percent capacity

wind at 27 percent capacity

solar at 19 percent capacity

[Batteries not included but required for wind and solar. Why did wind and solar
operate so far below capacity? Simple: Wind power never works when the
wind isn't blowing. Solar only works at maximum during the noon hour. Wave
power only works when the waves are the right height and the generator hasn't
been washed away in a storm.]

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Yucca Mountain contains an enormous supply of nuclear fuel that
should not be wasted. We don't recycle nuclear fuel because
spent fuel is valuable and people steal it. The place it went that it
wasn't supposed to go to is Israel. This happened in a small town
near Pittsburgh, PA circa 1970. A company called Numec was in
the business of reprocessing nuclear fuel. I almost took a job
there, designing a nuclear battery for a heart pacemaker. [The
army offered me more money to work on nuclear weapons
effects.] [A nuclear battery would have the advantage of lasting
many times as long as any other battery, eliminating many
surgeries to replace batteries.] Numec did NOT have a reactor.
Numec "lost" a quantity of reactor grade uranium. It wound up in
Israel. The Israelis have fueled both their nuclear power plants
and their nuclear weapons by stealing nuclear "waste." See:
Pittsburghlive

It could work for any other country, such as Iran or the United
States. It is only when you don't have access to nuclear "waste"
that you have to do the difficult process of enriching uranium,
unless you have a Canadian "CANDU" reactor or a British
Magnox reactor, both of which run on unenriched uranium.
Numec is no longer in business. The reprocessing of nuclear fuel
in the US stopped. That was the only politically possible solution
at that time, given that private corporations did the reprocessing.
My solution would be to reprocess the fuel at a Government
Owned Government Operated [GOGO] facility. At a GOGO
plant, bureaucracy and the multiplicity of ethnicity and religion
would disable the transportation of uranium to Israel or to any
unauthorized place. Nothing heavier than a secret would get out.

I have no financial stake in the nuclear power industry, and I
never have. Nobody is paying me to say this.

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Deaths per terrawatt year [twy] for energy industries, including
Chernobyl. terra=mega mega

fuel......... ........fatalities... .....who......... .......deaths per twy
coal......... .........6400...... ......workers........... .........342
natural gas..... ..1200...... .....workers and public... ...85
hydro........ .......4000..... .......public............ ............883
nuclear........ .........31...... ......workers............ .............8

Nuclear power is proven to be the safest. Source: "The Revenge
of Gaia" by James Lovelock page 102.

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Coal is almost pure carbon, except for the URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD,
MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine,
Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium,
Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum
and Zinc that are coal's impurities. Coal smoke and cinders are commercially
viable ORE for the above elements. Coal also contains organic hydrocarbons.
Chinese industrial grade coal is sometimes stolen by peasants for cooking. The
result is that the whole family dies of arsenic poisoning because Chinese
industrial grade coal contains large amounts of arsenic. Coal varies a lot.
You have to analyze it not only mine by mine but even lump by lump.
Reference:
OUR NUCLEAR FUTURE:
THE PATH OF SELECTIVE IGNORANCE
by Alex Gabbard
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge, TN
Selections from the 19th Annual Conference
SOUTHERN FUTURE SOCIETY
March 14,15,16, 1996
Nashville, Tennessee

Published by the
SOUTHERN FUTURE SOCIETY
1996
Edited by Jack D. Arters, Ed.D.
Conference Director
The truth is, all natural rocks contain most natural elements. Coal is a rock.
The average concentration of uranium in coal is 1 or 2 parts per million. Illinois
coal contains up to 103 parts per million uranium. A 1000 million watt coal
fired power plant burns 4 million tons of coal each year. If you multiply 4
million tons by 1 part per million, you get 4 tons of uranium. Most of that is
U238. About .7% is U235. 4 tons = 8000 pounds. 8000 pounds times .7% =
56 pounds of U235. An average 1000 million watt coal fired power plant puts
out 56 to 112 pounds of U235 every year. There are only 2 places the uranium
can go: Up the stack or into the cinders.
Since a reactor full fuel load is around 11 tons of 2% U235 and 98% U238, and
one load lasts about 10 years, and what one coal fired power plant puts into the
air and cinders fully fuels a nuclear power plant.
Compare 4 Million tons per year with 1.1 tons per year. 1.1 divided by 4 Million
= 2.75 E -7 = .000000275 =.0000275%. Remember that only 2% of that is
U235. The nuclear power plant needs ~44 pounds of U235 per year. The coal
fired power plant burns coal by the trainload. The nuclear power plant consumes
U235 in such small quantities yearly that you could carry that much weight in a
briefcase.
See also: ORNL Review

Coal is a $100 Billion per year industry in the US alone. That is why stopping
coal is going to be difficult.

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Given that Alaska may well experience the first big hits from global warming, Palin's stance on the environment in even more horrifying. She (unlike both McCain and Bush) has yet to acknowledge the science behind climate change (but then again she thinks dinosaurs were walking around in biblical times). You can read several more troubling points on her environmental record on my blog:
http://greendig.net/gun-crazy-palin-environment/

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Anyone else getting tired of the way AsteroidMiner posts four or five lengthy posts at one time? Start a blog and direct interested parties there, don't clog up Alternet!

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