You said:

“Obama was giving himself an out on building nukes by claiming that they are still not 100% safe. Of course what the hell is?”

What the hell is anywhere near as dangerous as nuclear energy? Almost safe doesn’t cut it when you are talking about something with a half life longer than man has been on earth.

You said:

“Obama will govern to the socialist left, as he intended all along; and that it’s full steam ahead, right over the economic cliff, the markets are telegraphing the inevitable.”

You mean we aren’t already over the cliff? The stock market did telegraph this, about a year ago when it topped.
Sorry but you don’t get to blame democrats for this one. Reaganomics has had over 25 years to prove itself, and it is an utter failure for 80% of Americans. $9 trillion of the $10 trillion federal deficit came under the past three Republican administrations. And their deregulation caused the savings and loan scandal, and the current crisis. The curent crisis is also a result of the middle class and lower class having no more spending power because their wages went down, while the rich raked it in big time thanks to tax cuts and other favorable policies. Not to mention the Republican war in Iraq, which isn’t exactly helping the economy.
Yeah, I know, democrats voted for it too, but it was the Bush administration that fooled us into it. You know damn well they planned it before 911. Dubya had to avenge his daddy’s failure to take out Hussein. His father was smarter than him.

What’s up with the word socialist? Obama is not a socialist just because he’s more liberal than you. Liberals aren’t looking for socialism, we want a market economy that works for all citizens. Top down, regressive tax schemes just concentrate all the wealth into a few hands, which ends up killing the engine of the economy, which is the working class. Labor creates wealth. Without it, all the capital in the world and all the great ideas and inventions and mangerial skills and entreprenaurial skills are worth nothing.
So why shouldn’t the workers get their fair share of the pie? Why is asking for that socialism?
Every successful economy in the world is a mixed economy. So what? it works. I would prefer to have a much smaller entitlement system. To do that capitalism has to work for all of us. So far no one has figured out how to do that. Captialism has a tendency to concentrate wealth. Always. So we and other mixed economy countries make adjustments, either by entitlements or the tax code or other means. We are now at a similar point at which we were in 1929, with very concentrated wealth. That has to change. Here’s what a Pew Research study found:

Between 1983 and 2004 the top 1%, in income, received 33% of the growth in wealth. The next 4% got over 25%.
The bottom 80% of us only got 11% of that growth. The bottom 40% actually went backward.
A middle age worker today makes 12% less than his father made in real buying power. Meanwhile, corporate executives now make 250-400 times as much as their workers. In 1978 they made about 25-35 times as much.

“The increases in income and wealth are all taking place at the very top. In fact in 2005 the richest one percent increased their income by far more than the total income of the bottom 20 percent.”
from http://www.pbs.org/ moyers/ journal/ 01182008/ transcript.html

Does that look like the American dream to you?
Don’t forget that we still had Reaganomics under Clinton.

Please read “The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy”

http://www.theleaneconomyconnection.net/downloads.html#Nuclear

Nuclear power is not sustainable. Why would we want that?

Oh, I forgot, you don’t like that word either. It’s very simple. The earth can no longer support what is not sustainable. That means us. It’s not as hard as it sounds. Change can be good.

We are in deep trouble with an energy crisis and an environmental crisis (between a rock and a hard place). We should think out of our cocoons.

Decommissioning of nuclear plants is well studied, it has reported costs and they are known quite well. Storing nuclear waste also has a cost, and they are known well too. Both these costs are included in the internal costs of nuclear power, which is still amongst the lowest possible. When you consider the external costs to the environment and humanity (not even including the effects of climate change), nuclear power comes out a big winner.

You can still carp on and on about hidden subsidies and insurances and so on.. But remember, the planet is on fire.

Electricity comes under what is called a natural monopoly. It is in public interest to generate electricity through public utility companies, for a non-profit bases. As is known in China, India, Japan, France (or any sensible country), this ensure stable and low electricity prices. There is no innovation and competition involved in the electricity generation, this is no place for a market. Private utilities and deregulation only bloats up the costs and adds huge uncertainity and market disturbances, for no gain. More important than that, private utilities discourage investment in much needed infrastructure (a better power grid for example).

Its less expensive to build plants, but as all ways the decommissioning and other hidden cost are usually left out. What about subsidies and insurance issue, all swept to the side.

How Much Will New Nuclear Power Plants Cost?
http://www.scitizen.com/ screens/ blogPage/ viewBlog/ sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=14&idContribution=2287

The costs of building new American nuclear reactors may be much higher than quoted by the industry.

Nuclear is expensive if you want it to be so. Undo all the deregulation fiasco in your electricity market, and you will get to see real numbers. Every other country in the world is going ahead with the construction of nuclear plants (and doing so quite cheaply as well).

Nuclear power needs 40 metric tons of steel and 190 cubic metres of concrete to produce 1 MW of power. The corresponding requirements for coal are 98 metric tons of steel and 160 cubic meters of concrete. Wind power needs a lot more : 460 tons of steel and 870 cubic meters of concrete. All this recent increase in construction costs is due to raw material prices. Coal and wind power plants will be much more affected by increasing costs of steel and concrete; nuclear power maintains its cost advantage.

The scheme responsible for reducing sulfur emissions is not similar to the cap & trade scheme which aims to reduce CO2 emissions. The earlier scheme (for sulfur) had hard caps which were directly imposed on the targeted private utility coal plants. There was no provision for trading the emissions.

This CO2 emissions-trade is a big joke. It will do nothing to prevent climate tipping points.

All serious climate scientists identify the problem with coal usage. If only coal usage is shut down completely, we have hope of stabilizing CO2 levels at 450 ppm. Oil and natural gas, by themselves, are not very dangerous. So it is coal that we need to ban, and this has to be done by a hard cap (no porous cap with “trade” holes). In other words, we need a moratorium on coal.

To do this, we have to strictly replace coal plants with non-fossil-fuel plants. This is as simple as that. There is no question of politics or personal preferences, it is a first-rate emergency and we have to deal with it likewise.

What is the best weapon to shut down coal plants ? Is it nuclear or wind power ? We can still debate about it, but we should all agree that coal plants should be shut down. This is the primary task.

Your argument that we must continue using coal because we use so much of it is reminiscent of what the whaling industry said in the late 1800’s — we had to continue to use whale oil and NOT that cheap “rock oil” (petroleum) een as we were running out of whales.

As for nukes — there really is no debate. It’s expensive. Just attend any ratemaking hearing being run by a PUC that is considering nuclear power. You’ll see that it’s appallingly expensive. Pretending it isn’t won’t make it so.

Markets change and innovate — that is, in fact, the source of most of the economic growth this country has experienced throughout its history. (See Schumpeter et al).

It’s folks who cling to 20th century technologies in the 21st century who threaten this economy — folks kind of like you.

Its good to see conservatives agreeing that there is warming, even though its only 1C. That value will also change in time like their position.

Conservatives are exaclty where they need to be to pull ahead on getting our co2 down to reasonable levels. A minority so that the earth can get back to a normal condition.

http://www.spiegel.de/ international/ business/ 0,1518,590038,00.html

“The one thing we know for certain — pursuit of nuclear power would inevitably raise electricity costs. Indeed, in Florida, utilities are allowed to jack up rates years long before the plant is built. It looks like the lucky customers of Progress Energy will get to each pay more than $100 a year for years and years and years before they even get one kilowatt-hour from these plants”

100 bucks a year? Wow, that will break them. Of course the thousands of extra money in taxes that Obama is going to charge them won’t have an effect. And if they would just build a million windmills, they would be free. The absurd conclusions that you reach are just incomprehensible. All of your idiotic ideas for power, like wind and solar, are not cost effective, and they need backup systems for power generation when the wind isn’t blowing. And those will raise the costs even more. On top of that, nobody wants the noisy ugly bird and bat killing things in their neighborhood.

[JR: Nice try. They are paying $100 bucks a year for maybe 8 years ON TOP OF their current electricity bill just for the privelege of maybe getting one nuclear plant built!]

“Does Herrington even realize what he is saying — claiming that anybody who talks about safety is secretly a nuclear opponent. ”

Herrington is very easy to interpret correctly on this. Why would you go so far out of your way to interpret him incorrectly? First of all, the safety record of nuclear is as good as any energy source, and it is far better than most. And don’t give me Chernobyl. We don’t build those kind of reactors.

By slapping the “safe” on the nukes, Obama wasn’t simply expressing a need for safety. Because that goes without saying. Obama was giving himself an out on building nukes by claiming that they are still not 100% safe. Of course what the hell is? Obama’s support for nuclear was just another cynical ploy to get votes – another broken promise for which he was very careful to leave himself an out when challenged on it later.

It was hilarious to hear the talking heads on the day after the election. They were all going on about how Obama was going to govern towards the middle, and how he was going to have to put some of his ambitions on hold for a time because of the economic realities. Now that they are finding out that Obama will govern to the socialist left, as he inteded all along; and that it’s full steam ahead, right over the economic cliff, the markets are telegraphing the inevitable. Obama is setting records. 1. Market most down on the day after an election. 2. The two days after the election are the two most down in history. 3. Five of the first six days after his election are down. 4. Three of the first six trading days after his election we have been down by more than 400 points. If you think that this is a sign of business people who think that business is going to be good in the future, then you need a new shrink.