I’ve talked at length on this site about the maneuver, within the structural workings of identity politics, for one subgroup within the larger identity group to push a particular master-narrative which, if and when it becomes the group’s official narrative, is then used to excommunicate heretics. Generally, this maneuver is easy to pass off to true believers, because it becomes rather simple to frame those ostracized by the guardians of the group’s narrativized “truth” as somehow “inauthentic”. And given that their claim to group membership is based, in the case of race, for example, on a mere “social construct,” there is simply no fighting the logic (eg., Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Ward Connerly, Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele).
Which is why, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, identity politics as a governing force are so remarkably pernicious. Because the very malleability of the membership requirements makes it easy for those committed to group power to cynically police their ranks, excluding outliers and apostates by effectively defining them out of the group. Thus, we have politicized “ethnic” or “racial” or “gender” groups that can, by way of citing the official group narrative (that they themselves helped create and shape, after an internecine battle), claim that, say, Black Republicans are not “really” Black—while conversely (and comically) bestowing on Bill Clinton the honorarium of “the first Black President” (the justification being that he says the things they say, supports the things they support, and enjoys many of the cultural activities they have claimed as their own).
The conception of race as culture essentially leads to the logical deconstruction of the very notion of race itself, as it is commonly understood (which, I’ve argued, is a different animal entirely than population genetics)—and no amount of academic sleight of hand (whether by way of appeals to heritage or group memory) can rehabilitate it.
And as that same maneuver applies even to “identity groups” that we don’t necessarily think of as having any foundation in essentialism, any claim such groups make upon an official narrative can be seen, then, a nothing more than a gambit to remove from the group anyone who dares challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Thus, feminists who push for equal protection under the law (but who are dubious about pushing for social policy that would give women an advantage before the law) are labeled “anti-feminists” — or else as “lapsed feminists” (in the cases of those who were integral in the early phases of the group movement, but who have now distanced themselves from the establishment feminism practiced today).
Such excommunications ensure the homogeneity of the message—even while allowing for some internal disagreement, provided fealty is shown to the kernel assumptions of the official narrative. So while it is true that within feminism there are competing camps, the one camp that is disallowed as “feminist” is that camp that refuses to notes that the original aims of first wave feminists have been met, and that pushing for special dispensation for women not only resists the original feminist message, but it has the ancillary effect of alienating those who believe in the primacy of the individual.
In the self-officiating world of identity politics, group political considerations matter far more than do individual voices, whose dissent is discouraged or even punished—regardless of that individual’s previous influence within the group. Such is the case of David Moore, Greenpeace founder and now, according to many of his former fellow travelers, an anti-environmentalist.
From the Wall Street Journal, “‘Producers’ Fuel Fight” (subscription only, so I’ll excerpt at length):
In 1971, Patrick Moore set sail with 11 other men in a leaky old halibut trawler from Vancouver, British Columbia, to protest against U.S. underground nuclear-weapons testing off the west coast of Alaska—creating what would become the environmental activist group Greenpeace. He eventually became the director of Greenpeace International, and a leading voice against nuclear power.
That was then. Today, Dr. Moore sits squarely in the other camp, a leading voice in support of nuclear power. His position: Nuclear power is a non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and help satisfy a growing global demand for energy.
“During my nearly 40 years as an environmentalist and student of sustainability I have only changed my position on one major issue: nuclear energy,” Dr. Moore says.
His change of heart, however, has infuriated many of his former colleagues—and is symbolic of the wider debate raging between supporters of nuclear power and its critics. The late Robert Hunter, another founding member of Greenpeace, once referred to Dr. Moore as an “eco-Judas.” Another fellow Greenpeace founder, Paul Watson, was even less restrained, calling him an “eco-whore” for switching to work for the nuclear industry.
Dr. Moore, 59 years old, shrugs off the attacks. “I am often confronted by the assertion that I am not an environmentalist because I support nuclear power…or whatever they don’t agree with,” he says. “I respond by saying that they are not in charge of giving out credentials for who is an environmentalist.”
In theory, Dr Moore is correct: if an environmentalist is, as s/he is frequently defined, someone who “advocates or works to protect the air, water, animals, plants, and other natural resources from pollution or its effects,” then it is clear that Dr Moore’s life’s work has been dedicated to the cause of environmentalism.
Sadly—but by no means surprisingly, however—Dr Moore finds himself labeled an apostate not because he advocates against the protection of air, water, animals, plants, and other natural resources, but rather because he dissents from one of the kernel assumptions of the now official “environmentalist” narrative: namely, that nuclear energy is anathema, and so therefore its use must be (in some cases) forcefully curtailed.
And so what we are seeing here is identity / interest group politics laid bare: the official narrative of environmentalists no longer allows for differing opinions about what, precisely, can accomplish the original goals of the movement (outside of certain agreed upon internal battles between, say, solar and wind energy advocates), but rather it involves an unquestioning acceptance of what the movement’s narrative has deemed “acceptable”—and nuclear energy, despite the fact that it could help facilitate the stated goals of the movement (and despite the undisputed fact that it is a clean energy source), is simply not open to consideration by anyone hoping to claim membership in the “environmentalist” camp, regardless of his or her other bona fides:
Dr. Moore, who left Greenpeace in 1986, insists he still holds true to almost all the policies Greenpeace initially pursued: banning nuclear testing, whale killing and toxic discharge. “I left Greenpeace because my fellow directors were drifting into policies that I did not believe had any basis in logic or science,” says Dr. Moore, now chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd., a Vancouver consulting firm. One such policy, he says, was a campaign for a global ban on the use of chlorine in drinking water, he says. (Greenpeace says it has no record of a campaign to ban chlorine in drinking water.)
[…]
Dr. Moore was certainly a believer in the past. In 1976, for instance, he had written as part of a Greenpeace report that aside from nuclear warheads, nuclear power plants were “the most dangerous devices man has ever created” and that their proliferation wasn’t just irresponsible but “criminal.”
So what made him change his mind? Dr. Moore traces his metamorphosis to a day trip he took seven years ago to Devon in southwest England. There he met another controversial figure, British scientist James Lovelock.
“I had always been fascinated by [Lovelock’s] Gaia hypothesis [which argues that the Earth functions as a kind of superorganism]…and when I found out he supported nuclear power I was even more intrigued,” Dr. Moore says. “We spent an entire day walking, lunching, supping and into the evening discussing Gaia, climate, nuclear energy.”
“Lovelock matter-of-factly said he would gladly take a bundle of used nuclear fuel, put it in his swimming pool and use it to heat his home,” Dr. Moore recalls. “This shook my brain into realizing that nuclear waste is no more dangerous than many other chemicals. The trick is to keep it contained and limit our exposure to it.”
[…]
Drs. Lovelock and Moore aren’t alone in embracing nuclear power as the answer to environmental ills. French scientist Bruno Comby in 1996 set up an independent and nonprofit organization, Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy. Members include Dr. Lovelock and former antinuclear activist Simone Weiss. In the U.S., Stewart Brand, an environmentalist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, has also voiced his support for nuclear power, while in 2004 the late British Bishop Hugh Montefiore was forced to step down from the board of Friends of the Earth after promoting the use of nuclear power in the fight against climate change.
[…]
Dr. Moore and others believe that nuclear power could help cut carbon-dioxide emissions—widely believed by scientists to cause global warming. What’s more, they say, it is a more attractive alternative to renewable energy sources, as it isn’t subject to the same fluctuations in energy production as wind farms and solar panels.
An increasing number of politicians are also looking to the political benefits of nuclear power, as it uses uranium as a primary material, which comes from politically stable countries such as South Africa and Australia.
“I don’t want to be dependent on Russia for gas, or the Middle East,” says Dick Taverne, a member of the U.K. House of Lords. “That’s another very powerful argument for nuclear power.”
Mr. Taverne, an early supporter of the environmental groups Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in the 1960s and 1970s, has since become disenchanted with the mainstream environmental movement. “Disillusionment set in as it became evident that they didn’t care or have much regard for evidence,” says Mr. Taverne, who in 2002 founded Sense About Science, which aims to advance public understanding of science. “Historically and fundamentally, it’s a rather antiscience movement.”
[my emphasis]
As with many religions (secular or non), environmentalism, in its current narrative form, is almost necessarily, as Mr Taverne avers, “antiscience.” And that’s because following science can sometimes lead to uncomfortable realizations about deeply held beliefs, and those beliefs, being so tied to identity, must be guarded ferociously—even if it means that the movement’s former priests are defrocked and publicly excoriated as heretics.
We’ve seen this before, with Bjorn Lomberg—who is skeptical over the science behind the global warming controversy. Ironically, it is now the mainstreaming of that very science that has environmentalists scampering to adjust their narrative so that those who propose practical solutions to global warming—that is, those who believe in the science and wish to affect a change—are marginalized as imposters for embracing the very means to achieve the stated end.
And that, I submit, is the real anti-environmentalism.
(h/t Terry Hastings)
I’m appalled that the TV weatherfolk movement is purging the warming skeptics in their midst. It hasn’t been this bad since a subgroup made state-temp-map hand gestures a membership requisite.
Mock me, sure. But on the plus side, I got a post in edgewise.
I know how Dr. Moore feels.
I tell people I’m a Republican and they say I can’t be a “real” Republican because I don’t support the Iraq war.
Then they call me a “lefty,” whatever thqat is (sounds bad).
*sniff*
Plenty of real Republicans don’t support the war. I didn’t call Bill Buckley a lefty. Nor do I call Chuck Hagel one.
Same goes for the whole paleocon contingent of the Republican party.
That they happen to align themselves with the position of lefties on the war doesn’t make them lefies. It has them, well, aligned with lefties.
Which I’ve pointed out. More to the shame of the lefties than to Pat Buchanan and his ilk—because at least with Buchanan, you know his motives.
People like Patrick Moore are important. They might be dismissed by the true believers in the eco-doom movement, but they are harder to dismiss for everyone else. I think the prime difficulty is the lack of exposure opinions like his suffer from.
Al Gore we hear from, Dr. Moore, not so much.
Might the purveyors of news be worse offenders than the PC attempted silencers?
Looking toward policy formation, there’s a pragmatic argument that could be made that environmentalist support for nuclear energy should be withheld outside of the context of a grand compromise which secures some other aspect of their dogma. The NRDC sometimes seems to hint at this. Pragmatism of this sort does a lot to undercut claims made about the “urgency” of confronting climate change.
Well, such “pragmatists” will have a hard time walking back terms like “eco-whore,” happyfeet,if and when the time comes that they bully lawmakers into a compromise.
I would pay money to see the look on Helen Caldicott’s face the day that happened.
Maybe their lights not turning on will help move them towards the pro-nuclear power side of things.
Sure. But only if we sign Kyoto simultaneously. Otherwise, it’s back to handcuffing themselves to reactors and climbing up redwoods.
I think a lot of people support nuclear power in theory…
…but they wouldn’t want to live near one of the 100 nuclear power plants per state it would take to replace America’s oil consumption.
I wonder what effect a concerted drive to increase nuclear power generation in this country would have on the bottom lines of large oil,natural gas, and coal mining interests ten to tweny years after the fact. I can only imagine it would be negative. Why then, are these people not clammoring for more nuclear power if for no other reason than to take a large chunck out of their natural enemies?
The problem is that in the 1970s we had these screams about global cooling. IT’S A NEW ICE AGE, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!
Then came the record breaking (at least in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Louisiana) summer of 1980 (which still has 69 (heh) record highs in Dallas alone). Maybe the cooling isn’t THAT bad.
Thirty years later, IT’S GLOBAL WARMING, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!
The same elite (effete?) academic community that brought us Global Cooling now proclaims Global Warming. And only 30 years of additional data has reversed “centuries long” trends. And yes, the northern hemisphere appears to be getting warmer, because the Russians have shut down most measuring stations in Siberia since the fall of the USSR which balanced out the hotter places in India and the US. Now there’s no counter balance when Dallas pushes 110 or something. And no records of any new record cold temperatures in large portions of Siberia.
So most of the hooey is statistically bogus. Unless you alter the centuries old data that was cited in the earlier studies.
So, did they “cook the books” then, or did they “cook the books” now? And if they “cooked the books” AT ALL, why should I believe them??
Another AGW apostate being chased out of the church.
How much media coverage will he get?
alphie, except for the Northeast, there is little relation between the production of electricity and “oil consumption” in the US.
People will move to places where there is cheap, plentiful, reliable power because that is where the jobs will be.
Because, nawoods, to solve the problem of clean energy—which would make conservation moot, while at the same time protecting mother earth from the perils of anthropogenic global warming—would seriously defang the “movement.” And the movement matters more than its goals, because the true goal of the movement now is to retain its power to shape policy.
And to be blunt, tirades about commercial fishing and the rainforests (which may themselves have been shaped by indigineous peoples to conform to their needs) just doesn’t sell as well as the prospect of global calamity.
None, unless someone invented a car that ran off of nuclear power. The only thing that will glean us off of oil consuption is unaffordable prices.
And high prices won’t hurt big oil. This is one reason any person with a well-balanced portfolio should have some “evil-oil” stashed in there for a healthy retirement.
And now alphie’s an expert on nuclear power?! Is there anything stupidity can’t do??
Yes, alphie, it’s amazing, innit, how France depopulated, since no one was willing to live near the nuclear power plants that generate 80% of that nation’s electrical power.
50,000 nukular power plants to replace oil consumption. With that kind of math, who needs al gore?
Perhaps anna nicole’s estate could donate her boob-bags to serve as a global umbrella to shield us from the nasty sun. if not all of us, maybe just Texas. Theres some intellectual equivalence to Alphies wisdom, so quoted above.
Good post Jeff. Again the problem of not confronting facts that would challenge the prevailing derangement. Lefties and their causes resemble Islamofacists – no wonder they shill for the caliphate.
Actually, 50 x 100 = 5000, oTT.
Halliburton accountant?
Yes, 5000. You got me!
5,000 and 2 used boobs, to be exact. Ante up or fold?
I think he means reactors, not plants
If we could only figure out why the pollution coming out of the stacks in India and China is less harmful to the environment then ours is, then all of these problems would solve themselves.
Someone should ask China and India why they won’t share that critical information. Do they hate Gaia?
alphie,
I’m okay with building one Ginormous nuclear powerplant in Utah or Montana or Colorado and then just distributing out the power through some sort of grid like system.
Don’t tell me we can’t do that either – we’re America, man. We can do *any*thing.
Well, there’s your trouble, right there.
I used to tell people I was a Republican, until I noticed that by and large, Republican politicians were every bit as stupidly vicious as Democratic politicians.
I used to tell people I was a Conservative, until the social-conservatives moved in and shouted down everyone else. And then I found out that on occasion, conservatism has stood for things that I didn’t agree with, so I stopped identifying myself that way.
Nowadays, I just call myself Dave. I figure: how could I go wrong?
And the movement matters more than its goals, because the true goal of the movement now is to retain its power to shape policy.
And what did I find earlier today nestled in a review of Algore’s movie?
Environmentalism; the new communism.
And, I live w/in 100 miles of a nuclear power plant, so I ain’t no chicken-NUKE-hawk.
Alphie:
Yes, it’s all about you and your feelings Alphie.
Alphie:
There are 103 nukes on line in America today producing 19.3 % of America’s energy needs. Which means we need roughly another 433 nukes to produce 100% of our electrical power needs. Which works out to ~10 nukes per state to completely eliminate burning coal, natural gas, and oil for electricity.
America is sitting on tons of weapons grade nuclear material that will be stored somewhere. Why not burn it in a power reactor first?
Ever figured out how much power is generated by those 22,000,000 42 gallon barrels of oil we burn every single day, Terry?
BS,
You’ve got my vote for the one enormous nuke plant.
What could possibly go wrong?
Heh, if something did go wrong, we’d never know about anyway.
The only question is…what should we call it?
Clean safe nukes, courtesy of the crazy ass, about-to-dominate-the whole-world-including America, hyperpower to be, China.
Produces hydrogen too. Yummy. I’ll rent out some space in my backyard for one of those puppies.
Yes indeed. Green is the new Red.
uhh, Terry I don’t think u are allowed to under bid a sitting pot in Texas Hold ‘em.
I raised ALphies 5,000 nukular plants to 5,000 + 2 used titties. Ante up or fold.
Lets save America from Oil consumption! (Hey don;t most power plants run on natural gas anyway?)
There’s a reactor 8 miles away from my house.
I’m equally worried about living under the flight approach path for RDU airport as I am about the Shearon-Harris plant. That is to say, not worried at all.
You know, we are still going to need some oil in our Nuke plants. Turbines, valves, they all need oil to move freely.
Alphie might want to read up on the San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California, featured in such movies as The Naked Gun. We’re all quite happy with its performance.
I have an uncle who works there as a reactor technician. On the other hand, he got there after serving on a nuclear submarine, so he must be a dumb, unejumakated military hick. (He is from Missouri, after all.)
alphie,
Why can’t we first run all of our home/office electrical needs off of nuclear first and if the demand for electric cars arise, expand the need there, later?
Or does that scenario take away your talking point?
By establishing an “inauthentic” narrative don’t they in turn strengthen the master narrative by setting it against an inauthenticity that they themselves largely define? In that sense, the apostates can be helpful to the movement. Once the anti-nuclear energy narrative is decided, they can then use that narrative to delegitimize other pro-active solutions to CO2 emissions by saying, “Well if we were going to do that we might as well just build hundreds of nuclear power plants, but the truth is that what proponents of solution b aren’t acknowledging is that climate change has revealed the many ways in which the current appetite the United States has for energy is fundamentally unsustainable.”
This seems parallel to labelling people who raise questions about global warming as “skeptics,” since doing so perpetuates Global Warming as the master-narrative. You never read that environmentalists are “skeptical” of those who believe that healthy economic growth is essential to solving environmental problems.
Just so everyone knows the score, alphie, in this thread alone, has gotten wrong:
–The number of plants needed to replace all generating plants w/ nuclear power plants.
–The likelihood of people living near a nuclear power plant.
I expect that we’ll be hearing about the mounds of dead from past nuclear accidents, or how the greatest American General George Meade built the first nuclear plant atop a mile-high berm next.
Sounds like a great place to live, Russ.
Some might question the wisdom of locating a nuclear power plant in the approach path of a major airport, though.
As Ronald Reagan once said, the building of 5000 nuclear power plants begins with a single brick.
Let’s see if we can locate one in Washington, DC and take it from there.
Alphie:
Once again Alphie makes Jeff’s point by internalizing the narrative and dismissing all who offer arguments counter to it.
Trolls can be useful.
Complete BS. Once more, alphie, you’re a dumbass.
Back when I was a kid, they were building a nuclear power plant about two miles from my home town. Lots of people worked at the plant during its construction—one of my brothers, a good friend’s brother—and hardly anyone in the town had a concern about the plant’s safety. If anything, we were hoping the presence of the plant would bring in enough tax base to turn our school district into an “exempted” district that doesn’t need property taxes, like another nearby town.
But the plant was fought tooth-and-nail every step of the way. Not by the residents; by people from outside the area. It wasn’t “not in my backyard” but rather “not in YOUR backyard, either”.
Eventually the utility company gave up and converted the plant into a coal-burning plant. In the process, 500+ acres of wooded hillside was turned into a fly-ash pit.
Jeez, lighten up, Terry.
I take it you never saw the classic movie The Big Bus?
We use oil for a lot more than burning, how did you come up with that number? Does that take into account the SPR? I’ve seen numbers like that pretty frequently, can you post a link or a cite?
Nuclear energy produces electricity and heat, some places are still burning oil and Natural gas to make electricity, this is an incredible waste of resources, no matter how clean gas is.
And nuclear power-plants also generate a huge number of jobs, lots of people will move to the area. And when they go away, you can kiss off a couple thousand jobs, the real-estate market and infrastructure improvements. Like when they killed off this billion-dollar sandbox down the road from me.
The problem with nuclear plants in the US is that they are so damn expensive and fossil fuels are so damn cheap.
Let’s see if we can locate one in Washington, DC and take it from there.
Why does the name “Kennedy” and “wind farm” seem so familiar?
OH YEA, because Robert Kennedy, environmentalist, didn’t want one in his back yard.
Leaving aside whether DC is a state, is alphie suggesting that DC needs 100 nuclear power plants?
In the name of Oppie and Bohr, why??
(But then, one might ask that question of alphie’s very existence. WHY?????)
Ok, now I have looked, and I live within 100 miles of two nuke plants! woo hoo! So there goes that theory.
Jeff, for some reason this post of yours has clarified something that’s confused me for quite a while. Namely, the tendency of some people to label criticism of behavior and values as “racism”. For some reason, they’ve decided “race=culture & culture=race”.
I never really got that before, sad to say. I’d always been baffled by the cries of “racism!” that greeted what was a discussion of culture, not race.
Alphie:
At least Alphie is honest enough to disclose his sources.
I have no problem with nukes, Terry, as long as they don’t build any in my backyard…and we’re well prepared for any accidents, of course.
Carin:
While I think the idea “Green is the new Red” and references to watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) are going a bit far, I do think that many of the hard-core enviros have a separate agenda.
For them, it’s never enough to come up w/ alternate fuels or nuclear power. Because the idea is to “change the way we live.” Thus, the mantra that the American way of life is unsustainable. And why, as Jeff posits, global warming is the key—b/c it’s so enormous that only enormous measures will suffice.
Of course, such measures need not extend beyond our own borders. The Chinese and Indians wouldn’t listen, “I can only influence my own country,” and the satisfaction of limiting the advancement of a billion or so out of poverty is nothing compared w/ stiffing (the far more blame-able) Americans.
And just as there were plenty of “useful idiots” (Lenin’s term, not mine) who supported Soviet objectives without necessarily being pro-Soviet, so there are many who genuinely fear global warming and deforestation and the rest, w/o subscribing to the more radical agenda.
(Amusingly, the same folks who claim that conservatives are “fearful” of head-chopping Muslims, are the first to question why folks aren’t more fearful of the possibility of global climate shifts, which will occur over the course of decades.)
Hmmm….
iirc we have hundred of nuclear reactors currently in service on US warships.
To date none have gone kablooie.
… that we know of.
Basically, we could just build nuke equipped ships, put them along water ways throughout the US – which is where the population centers are – and run some big-ass jumper cables to them to provide the power for the community.
Problem solved.
Plus, they’re warships so they’d have guns and shit that will help protect us against terrorists.
It’s a win-win.
That may seem like some “outside the box” thinking there, but I’ve read enough of alphie’s post to make the whole ‘box’ paradigm irrelevant.
So, now we can see where alphie gets his “understanding” of Asia.
Is that your view of women, alphie? Sex objects, and nothing more?
Or is it just Asian women who deserve to be objectified, you racist POS?
Wow!
We could build big ass blimps and float nuclear power plants that would also serve as a missile shield!!!
IIRC Pablo, the people that live closest to our local nuke plant, pay no property taxes. I don’t know if their electricity is free as well, but that could be negotiated individually as we build an extra 10 per state in the coming years. I’m sure smart towns will lobby the electric company to “put it here!, please!”
Please note I did not state that nuclear energy could or would replace oil. I simply stated that were many or all of the current oil, natural gas, and coal burning power plants to be replaced by nuclear ones, the executives and stockholders of companies that sell oil, natural gas, and coal would not be happy campers. And since those companies are clearly the sworn enemies of “envirnmentalists”, it would make sense to me that Al Gore and his merry band would be all for it. I will admit it was a loaded question. I already share Jeff’s opinion on the subject. Its not about the environment but about political power. Green really is the new red.
I was going to say Pablo, living near a properly designed reactor wouldn’t be so bad. But NIMBY’s don’t think.
Looks like we have plenty of good ideas here.
Get me an executive summary by 2:00 pm and I’ll see if I can get the ball rolling.
alphie,
You’re not an executive.
We can prepare a selection of rebuses to convey the basics, if you’d like.
Frickin’ NIMBY.
Lets do the math – even if we assume that 22 million barrels of oil are burned in power plants to make energy:
22million Barrels = 3,080 millions Metric Tons of crude oil (300 gals/MT)
3,080 mill MT @ 44.9 GJ/MT = 138.3 million GJ
On the other hand:
1,000 MT Uranium at 443,000 GJ/MT = 443 million GJ (thats just in a light water reactor)
Thats a 4 times power for less than 0.00003% of the fuel used by weight.
Check my math here:
http://patzek.berkeley.edu/E11/energyconversionfactors.htm
The majority of crude oil is refined into more useable substances, not burned in power plants. Typical rule of thumb for a refiner is 5 barrels of crude gives 3 barrels of gasoline and 2 barrels of distillate. The latter includes High Sulphur Diesel which is the fuel of choice for peaking (quick start) or dual fuel power plants. SO of the 2 barrels of distillate, lets assume 0.5 makes it to Diesel and of that 0.5, less than 10% is used for power generation fuel – well u see where that leads us … not that anyone is quibbling about numbers or anything, right?
Alphie – I had u on 5,000 Nukulars and 2 titties. The old school smackdown was icing on the cake. You’re done – walk away.
One point that always seems to get overlooked is the impression that Kyoto was cobbled together by a bunch of wise climate scientists to tackle global warming . Nothing could be farther from the truth .
Ugh, we have a God damn Dave commenting here. It’s bad enough we have an alphie.
wink-wink. Nudge-nudge.
Perhaps because it’s not a good energy producer relative to enriched uranium? Leastways that was the gist of all the talks on the topic at the last American Nuclear Society meeting I attended. You may and probably can get better performance from a clean sheet design optimized for MOX burning but that’s a lot of years down the road any way you slice it.
As for the rest of you constantly responding to Alphie, QUIT PLAYING WITH THE RETARD IN PUBLIC.
You’ll go blind and the rest of us will go bored. It’s bad enough he pollutes Patterico to no net gain w/o the cancer spreading over here.
FYI – You can get free access to Wall Street Journal with a thing called a netpass from: http://news.congoo.com
Andrew Tobias Blogged this last week and I thought it was a great tip!
alphie
I live in Laguna Niguel CA 12 miles from the San Onofre nuclear Power Plant. Within that 12 mile radius lies some of the most expensive housing in Southern California. Why is this? So much for locations huh? All is good, at least I don’t think I glow at night…..
I have it on unimpeachable authority that kangaroos do not produce co2. So we have two solutions right there.
1. The weedy solution- stop eating cow, start eating kangaroo.
2. The thinking hard-drinking-businessman’s solution- breed, slaughter and sell genetically modified cowaroos.
Anyone like to come in on the ground floor? I plan to transport the meat as underslung load from spare balloons.
Mooboing!
TODD,
Ignore the ignorant retard, because like everything else he comments about, he has no understanding of nuclear power or its use. The San Onofre power plant is within 100 miles of Los Angles, San Diego, Riverside counties… basically the one of the most populous dense regions on the continent & most popous in the US – including the 2nd & 7th/8th largest cities in the US & contains almost 2/3 of California’s population. I guess that means that the little retard wouldn’t live in LA, Orange County, San Diego or parts of most of the coast in Baja California, Mexico. He should probably rule out most Naval ports or ports open to out allies, since Nuclear based reactors power most air-craft carriers & submarines as well – which will rule out San Francisco, Seattle, New York.
While I think the idea “Green is the new Red†and references to watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) are going a bit far, I do think that many of the hard-core enviros have a separate agenda.
Lurking – I do not believe that the vast majority of those on the “Climate Disaster” bus are red. But, those driving the bus?.
That’s the problem . Information about those doing the driving is available , but seldom mentioned by the MSM .
I think that some, like Dr. Moore, are genuine environmentalists.
OTOH, I think many of his successors have a different starting point.
Amusingly enough, this video points to some of what seems to be going on (both intentional and non-intentional nonsense).
And, for the likes of some, it would seem, radical environmentalism would seem to be part of a larger whole.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I think that reducing pollution is probably a good thing, and got that from that first generation of enviros, dating back to the 1970s. And, yeah, Iron Eyes’ ads got to me, too.
But crippling America while allowing China and India to pollute? Relying on Euro-compliance to make Kyoto work (since the 1990s, the US has come closer to meeting Kyoto than many of the Euros have, and the Russians are intent on reindustrializing)? And that, unfortunately, is where too many of those driving the bus are coming from.
Why? We can put a balloon fence around it.
I know, I know we’re not supposed to play with him, but I love alphie’s inferrence that all states are the same size.
Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse ? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about ? Maurice Strong , Earth Summit , Rio , 1992 ……. oh , and by the way , yeah , he’s the dude who cooked up Kyoto .
Great post, Great comments! This one strikes home for me as I have been arguing this battle since 1980 and, as a result, have taken unmitigated crap.
While I don’t have a high opinion in general of the rank and file enviro-activists who waddle around like eco Mother Theresas, my experience is that their collective understanding of nuclear physics in general and nuclear power (specifically the health concerns) in particular is generally woeful.
I am not a science geek but I had the opportunity to work for a Health Physics company that was under contract to GPL to provide testing and support for their reactors (which included Salem, Oyster Bay, Yankee and others.) This is what caused me to be pulling in to the main gate at Three Mile Island on March 28, 1979, only to have a guy direct me to the Visitor’s Center because there had been a “bad incident” in the reactor. Thus started the 4 week odyssey which included testifying in from of the investigative commission, getting grilled by Harold Denman (scary), tracking radiation releases and other happy funtime opportunities in the nuclear wonderland.
Since alphie raised the issue of reactor safety, let me give you the quick synopsis as told to me by several nuclear engineers and PHD health physicists.
1) The knuckleheads who were running that plant did just about everything they could to blow the reactor up.T he safety features wouldn’t allow them. Nuclear plants have the best per capita safety record of any heavy industry in the world.
2) The short and long term health effects from the radiation leaks to the general population have been proven to be inconsequential as all of the radioactive isotopes that were vented were “non body assayable,” meaning that they could not be absorbed by body mass. I was on and off the island for four and a half weeks and my exposure was about 1/3 of a chest x-ray, biologically insignificant. (10 MLR for the geeks.)
Jeff has it nailed. It’s always been too little about the science and way to much about the movement, the idea of fundamentally changing human behavior to fit an idealistic vision that has virtually no practical reality in an industrialized world. The very same “anti-science” that was brought to bear on nuclear power has now morphed and mutated into a Mothra sized propaganda campaign for Gaia supremacy over the evil capitalists.
BTW: I have three healthy, non mutated kids. although the fact that my urine still glows concerns me sometimes…
The problem with nuclear plants in the US is that they are so damn expensive and fossil fuels are so damn cheap.
That was definitely true of the older plants. This was due in part to the interminable delays caused by legal actions brought by zealots of all stripes. Also, it used to take about a decade to break ground and bring a power plant online. The billions of dollars borrowed by utilities generated a lot of expense in the form of loan interest. Now, however, there are some newer designs that can be built much more quickly. This does not include more modular plants like the pebble bed, because that plant design has not yet been approved by the NRC. Want to see of the generation 3+ designs(pebble bed is gen 4, I believe)? Search for ESBWR(economic simplified boiling water reactor) and look at the design. It has almost no mechanical pumps, relying instead on passive convective fluid flow, which reduces/almost eliminates problems like Three Mile Island from recurring. Oh, and the best estimate from design engineers is just under 3 years from ground breaking to generating electricity.
Cut back on the asparagus and Anjeno, BJT.
BJTexs:
You have, of course, left out the Chernobyl reactor. Designed by those paragons of environmental concern, the USSR, b/c they didn’t have to worry about ugly things like “profit motives,” Soviet reactor designs were a tad less reliable.
And yet, the people of Belarus and Ukraine have had the temerity to tear down the statues of those heroes who laid the groundwork for Chernobyl! The audacity! The stupidity! (Of whom, we can debate.)
Fortunately, w/ the demise of the USSR (yes, alphie-the-Republican, weep for the fall of the USSR), the number of unsafe, unshielded reactors has fallen radically, as Soviet designs have been shut down.
But if Chinese and Indian demand for power continues to rise, it’s an interesting question as to what reactor designs they’ll choose. (PBRs would be quite a step forward—we’ll see if the rumors are true.)
I read this article at lunch today and was amazed as Jeff was at the sheer cultish behavior of the Greepeace members who have excommunicated Dr. Moore from their movement.
Obviously, the numbers don’t lie- we ALREADY use more nuclear sources than oil or natural gas when it comes to generating electricity. In order to replace coal (which accounts for roughly half of our energy producing sources) with a non-fossil fuel burning source of energy, the only candidate that is even worth mentioning is nuclear power.
Here’s yet more clarification for the “renewable energy source” crowd-
And before anyone else wants to discuss this subject any further, I would suggest they read what I consider the most detailed explanation of the fallacies behind renewable resources.
Stephen Den Beste wrote this two years ago, and it still holds up just fine. Even more so with the numbers I quoted.
And dump the Corona with lime for real American beer too
P.S. From time to time I’ve noticed people going very quiet and whispering in an ominous fashion: “Three Mile Island…” when presented with a pro-nuke point of view.
That’s when I say, uh, TMI safety initiatives worked, remember?
Sometimes it’s not so hard to figure out who’s full of shit and who’s not.
I left out that big, steaming pile of monkey crap for obvious reasons. The per capita claim is based upon US results, although I would expect them to have the same good rate of success in France.
One Correction from my novella above: Harold Denton (memory is the first to go.)
One of the perks of my job was to hang out at the Operator’s School in Yankee in Middleton, Ct. It was run by two ex navy guys who had a $750,000 (in 1979!) reactor simulator. We spent many a happy hour trying to melt down the pretend reactor. As I was leaving that job to go to TMI they expressed their opinions that the operators there “sucked.” shoulda listened…
INRE: nuclear power near Washington, DC
Calvert Cliffs, Lusby, MD – about a 50 mile drive along the Louis Goldstein Parkway from Calvert County, MD to DC. (It turns into Pennsylvania Avenue somewhere in there. Yeah, that one.)
In 2000 it had its license extended another 20 years.
BJTexs:
Oh, certainly, certainly. I just figgered I’d preempt any simian poo-flingers who might choose to show their heads.
The reality is that we could, in relatively short order, reduce both national dependence on foreign oil to some extent, while at the same time clean up portions of the environment and emissions, if we simply transitioned the last of the oil-fired plants to nukes.
It’s the juxtapositioning of posts like this one with the Leif Garrett post and the Walrus post that makes PW so entertaining.
Thanks, Jeff.
tw: forces45
Speaking of uranium, do we have enough to make a go of it with domestic supplies only?
In other words: what kind of quantities are we talking here?
I’d go with the mile-high dirt berm. It would provide an additional layer of radiation shielding!
Step one: Alphie should go pound sand up his ass.
Let me know hen you’re done with that, and I’ll tell you about step 2.
Um, Pablo? That’s a waste of perfectly good sand that could be used to make Mile High Dirt Bermsâ„¢ around the 5000 nuclear plants.
We need to think of the national interest.
Puh – leese! I wouldn’t be caught dead drinking that ostrich piss! Yuengling Lager and Guiness all the way!!
For real yuks, go check out the Deformed Daisys from TMI.
I want a reactor literally in my backyard.
I’ll sell what I don’t use.
Lee;
Do they have them in a soft teal? It’ll match my curtains…
Well BJ, Iwould go for the more manly hunter green, but I’m sure you could get it in the color you want, sure. =)
Imo, in this exciting, yet very desperate, ageold Game of Control, control itself is both the means and the ends. Other justifications for playing the Game really have no independent meaning to the Players. But regardless these issues then become polluted, trivialized, or even rendered nonsensical by the Game virtually as its necessary ill side effect.
Imo, the Game itself represents a not fully realized or admitted diversion from the problem of what our existence is and means, and can almost not possibly be an answer or solution to it. [But just try telling that to the Players.]
The primary reason that there is a “consensus” on human-activity-caused global warming:
The true-blue scientists can’t get published, nor granted tenure if they disagree.
That’s some powerful scientific data.
We’re arrogant to think that we control the weather and climate on this planet when there is a friggin’ STAR 93 million miles away that can hold a million of these little blue marbles.
The environmentalism-as-religion theme becomes even more clear when you look at the history of Indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church and compare it to how Carbon Credits work. Yes, you sinned, but if you pay this fee, your sins are absolved, my son.
Its the modern faith for the atheist who hates religion, complete with priests, churches, and sacraments. And it will linger regardless of the science in one form or another, shifting constantly like the war between Eastasia and Eurasia. Global Cooling was never a threat, it has always been Global Warming. Global Warming was never a threat, it always has been Polar shift, or whatever goofy theory is next.
They have those credits with low-income housing too. Veeeeeery interesting how some townships get around that one.
Whatever happened to the hole in the ozone layer we were all told to be scared of in the early ‘90s?
Y2K fixed it .
Well, really, the problem fixed itself. We’re back in 1907, so the ozone hole has yet to exist.
Wishbone —
Have ya ever noticed that most of these Gerbil Worming types are also Secular Humanists? They believe that Mankind is the cause of all of the Universe’s problems (are there any SUVs melting the polar ice caps on Mars?) for the simple reason that they cannot accept the possibility of any Power in the Universe greater than themselves.
Y’know; like Chanticleer the Cock, who believed that it was his crowing that caused the Sun to rise….
[…] they otherwise would be. In my opinion, bigotry rationalizers like yourself make American society a much worse place than it might be. That’s a significant responsibility on your shoulders. Posted by Jeff G. @ […]