Gore Speech, April 13, 2002

Great Debates
21

Cite from ‘Ethics in Engineering’ by Dr. Pinkus, Dr. Shuman, et al. University of Pittsburgh:

Odds of a catastrophic fatal accident happening at a nuclear powerplant per 100 years: 1 in 1,000,000.

Yup. The odds of dying in a meltdown if you live adjacent to a modern nuclear power plant for 100 years are 1 in 1,000,000.

I used to have a whole listing of various ‘odds’ that all came out to 1 in 1,000,000.

I could probably find it if I dig, but some of the stuff on there was just, really off the wall.

22

Thanks. Too many horrors from the words, “nuclear”, I suppose.

23

I can’t stand GW, but Gore was a bad candidate last time and his running mate was bad in the campaign and has gotten even worse by cozying up to GW on this “faith based” thing.

Get somebody else - anybody.

24

IANANP(I Am Not A Nuclear Physicist), but my Dad was and ran the nuclear reactor saftey division at Sandia Labs for like 18 years. What I post is second hand from him and other sources, any mistakes are mine.

The cause of the Chernobyl accident was the fact that they turned off important saftey systems to run a test. From what I remember, a doctoral student wanted to run a test for his dissertation or what ever the Russkies call them. To run the test they shut off amost all the saftey systems and, well, bad things happened. I imagine that the student ended up in a gulag if he didn’t die. Anyway, the big issue with Chernobyl was the lack of a containment dome. Containment domes are designed to, obviously, contain the residue from an accident. Without a containment dome the residue from the partial meltdown gets blown all over the place. Also, without a containment dome, it is really hard to get close enough to do anything with the mess that was left over.

Anyway, nuclear plants in Europe and the US have way higher saftey standards.

On to the OP, Gore said something about how shipping nuclear material to Yucca mountain is a danger to 45 states. Well, we’ve been shipping nuclear stuff on the highways and railroads for something like 40 years and there has never been a fatality related to those shipments. I guess he didn’t know that.

Slee

25

What, like we just woke up this morning and discovered the problem!?! We’ve had at least 25 years to invest in renewables, we’ve had like 10 to raise the CAFE standards and close the loopholes involving SUVs, … This argument of always needing a little more time is bullshit. If we have a lower oil supply, prices will rise, and we will use less of it. That is the way it is supposed to work rather than continuing to subsidize the inefficient and wasteful use of environmentally damaging energy sources! As I like to say, if the current Pres had the same attitude on drug addiction as he has on fossil-fuel addiction, he’d be proposing growing opium poppies in ANWR.

There are lots of problems with this logic. First, I believe that the recent National Academy of Sciences study on the subject noted that cars would not necessarily have to be made smaller and lighter to achieve significant gains in fuel economy. And, even if that did turn out to be the cheapest way for the auto companies to go, they noted, that the issue is complicated. E.g., if you put the greatest pressure on the larger vehicles then you would tend to reduce the width of the weight distribution of vehicles which would have a countervailing effect of tending to reduce fatalities. And, indeed, the proposed legislation, by eliminating the separate standard for SUVs, would tend to do this. There were also some other safety provisions in the bill.

Also, I think that, despite your convoluted economic arguments, past experience has shown CAFE standards to be fairly effective in decreasing gasoline usage (or at least slowing its increase). [Why, by the way, is it that believers in markets suddenly don’t believe in simple supply and demand curve arguments when it comes to this market but believe in them to the hilt when it comes to a way more complicated market like the labor market and the minimum wage?] I’ll have to look at what the NAS study said on this specific point.

And, while I agree with you on the idea that taxes on gasoline could be a better way to go, it sounds like you like it more as “a poison pill” approach since you seem to believe [and I might tend to agree] that the political will to do this isn’t there. [Hey, if we had a law that subsidized computers so you could buy a new 2 Ghz one with all the fixings for only $400, I bet there would be a lot of opposition to getting rid of that too…People do like to be subsidized.] So, Sam, do you support considerably higher taxes on gasoline or are you just trying to propose Democrats take it on because you want them to fall on their face politically?

Finally, thanks for the nuclear statistics catsix, although these sorts of estimates are extremely hard to make so I would be rather suspicious of them! Remember the ridiculously low estimate that had apparently been made for a space shuttle blowing up before the Challenger disaster happened? At any rate, the argument over nuclear seems fairly mute at the moment in that we will (and I think should) continue using the plants we have. And, we seem not to be building new ones for economic reasons. [Admittedly, that may be partially due to the externalities associated with the fossil fuel sources. But, nuclear (fission) has enjoyed a fair bit of subsidization itself…certainly way more than any other alternatives to fossil fuels.]

26

Again, these sorts of arguments are kind of silly. If we are talking about an event that either occurs and has rather enormously bad consequences or doesn’t occur and has no bad consequences, it is just deceiving to argue “well there haven’t been any bad consequences yet”. What one would have do to is make careful arguments about the various possible scenarios that could occur and some estimate of their likelihood [which is not always easy] and their consequences. Given our current (rightfully!) heightened awareness of terrorism, that is one of the types of scenarios that must be considered. There may be good arguments to believe that the dangers of shipping these nuclear wastes to Yucca Mt. are rather small but you certainly haven’t made one.

27

Oh yeah, one more point to catsix…You are more than a little mistaken if you are thinking of ANWR as a short-term solution on time scales like “dealing with Saddam”. Even if ANWR is opened to oil drilling tomorrow, it would be several years until any oil flowed (the number I seem to recall is like 10 years, but I may be mistaken). Thus, this is not a short term solution at all.

28

Oh yeah, one more point to catsix…You are more than a little mistaken if you are thinking of ANWR as a short-term solution on time scales like “dealing with Saddam”. Even if ANWR is opened to oil drilling tomorrow, it would be several years until any oil flowed (the number I seem to recall is like 10 years, but I may be mistaken). Thus, this is not a short term solution at all.

29

Well, point taken. But I guess you cannot read between the lines. Let me explain:

Gore’s arguement - Transporting nuclear waste is a disaster waiting to happen. (As if transporting nuclear material is a new thing)

My arguement - Well, we’ve been doing it for 40 years and, so far, is safer than walking down the street. Gore didn’t know that.
I did not go into the saftey systems and the testing that went into those systems for a reason. I didn’t want to get bogged down in details. I wanted to make the point that Gore is ignoring objective fact. He is trying to score political points by pointing to a danger that he never hinted at before. His thinking probably went something like “Oh, nuclear waste on the highways and railroads, well we can use that against Bush and the Republicans”. When, in fact, the transport of this material has been going on for years. He didn’t bring up numbers. In fact he didn’t even hint that this has been going on for years. It was a scare ploy, nothing more.

If you want numbers I’ll call my Dad who studied this stuff for about 18 years. IIRC, the odds of dying in a nuclear accident is 1/10th of the odds of dying from a lightning strike.

Slee

30

Well, I agree that, without numbers, Gore’s statement doesn’t tell us too much but, then again neither does yours. Do you know how much highly radioactive waste has actually been transported in the last 40 years? I believe all the high-level waste from commercial plants has remained right at the plants pending a decision on what to do with it. [Note that the fuel rods are not highly radioactive before they are used…only after.] I am honestly not sure how much highly radioactive waste from government sources has been transported.

31

JShore: If you want my personal opinion, I’m kind of ambivalent about ANWR, but not for environmental reasons - frankly, I think environmentalists wildly overplay the environmental effects of drilling there, just as proponents overplay just how valuable it will be as a way to get off of foreign oil.

Rather, I kind of support the doctrine that it’s better to let the Middle East run out of oil first. ANWR is a giant mother of a strategic petroleum reserve, and I see no compelling reason to deplete that. One day, it will be a substantial competitive advantage for North America to have proportionally bigger supplies of oil than it does now.

As for gasoline taxes - Frankly, I think they are bad idea absent an alternative. The economy is already in rough shape, and adding a fuel tax right now would not be a good idea.

But I’m a compromising kinda guy, and I have come more and more to believe that it would be a good thing to end foreign dependence on oil. So I’ll cut you a deal - You agree to allow the construction of enough nuclear power plants to replace the small percentage of power that is created today from oil (about 8%), plus enough plants to absorb the projected demands on electricity from electric cars and fuel cell production and use, and I’ll agree to a tax that caps the price of gasoline at what it is today, so that when demand for it falls as we replace oil and gas with nuclear the taxes will slowly increase to maintain the price at current levels. Hell, I might even agree to an annual small increase so that in 50 years the price of oil crosses the current price curve for alternative energy. I’ll even agree to allow the revenue from those taxes to be spent on research into alternative forms of energy.

What do you say? Have we got a deal? Let’s be politicians for a moment and try to hammer out a real compromise here.

32

Threadkiller,

What about the up and coming John Edwards (NC)? It looks like he his gearing up to make a run for the Presidency as well. I know him becouse I am from North Carolina, yet I’m sure he is not a household name in America. If he can get some name recognition he could be a credible threat.
However, I think Gore wants this and wants it bad.

33

Well, this is getting exciting! If you guys succeed in this endeavor then I want you both to move to Texas so I can write you in for the next election. We have a lovely senate seat open (vacated by Phil Gramm) and a nice house seat just to my west in Denton county (vacated by Dick Armey). I’ll let you two fight over who gets which seat.

34

Are you serious? Who on earth ever thought of “welfare queens” :rolleyes: when they hear the phrase “special interests”? Are the welfare moms meeting in closed-door sessions with our nations most powerful lawmakers, making deals with all that welfare dough they’ve got so much of?

Good lord…

Anyway, just reading that speech gave me a thrill. Wheeeeeeeeee. Maybe it will all turn out to the good in the end… America needed to actually ** see ** for itself what Bush II would * really * be like, and Gore had to have nothing to lose so that he could speak up and speak his heart, instead of trying to people-please. Let’s hope he stays this bold.

I’d heard about the speech and was pleased, but reading it was… just great. Made my day. Thanks, obidah.

** Sam, ** do you really believe a significant portion of Americans decide to drive more because fuel is cheaper? Perhaps a few families decide to drive a little farther on vacation, but apart from that…people gotta go where they gotta go.

35

Yes, actually, because it’s another ‘failure’ of engineering that I had to research during the years I was in engineering school. I’m far more acquainted with the vast mistakes of the engineers around that table, and the failure of Roger Boisjoly than I’d like to be. <aside> That accident happened because a bunch of engineers extrapolated data to temperatures for which they had no test data, but knew that the O-rings had failed at temperatures above those of launch condition. The failure of the engineers was in not standing by their convinctions and communicating them clearly to launch control. Seven people died because of it.</aside>

Another interesting catastrophic accident in which a variety of circumstances lined up in just the right manner is the Piper Alpha oil rig fire that killed 167 workers. A combination of poor planning, poor engineering, poor practices and poor warnings contributed to the destruction of that platform and the deaths of nearly everyone on it.

As for ANWR, well, I wonder if the public’s getting all the facts. The actual area that would be opened in ANWR is a 2000 acre desolate arctic desert, which is a tiny fraction of the 19 million acre reserve. Also notable is that the caribou herds in other areas of Alaska that are being drilled have quintupled, increases especially noted in the area around the trans-Alaska pipeline. The pipeline provides warmth on the tundra - and actually encourages caribou breeding. The teamsters support the drilling. There is already a simple majority in the Senate willing to approve the bill, but Tom Daschle is attempting to fillibuster (requiring 60 votes to break fillibuster) because Daschle has a heavy interest in gasoline containing more ethanol. He wants gasoline to contain more ethanol because ethanol is made from corn, and he has a large voting block that are corn farmers. (Ref. Diane Feinstein’s recent address). Normally I can’t stand anything Feinstein says, but when she made note that not only do Alaskan natives fully favor drilling in that 2000 acre section of ANWR, enviornmental groups are also in support of it, because when burned, petroleum based gasoline produces less smog than gasoline containing ethanol. So there are Republicans on board, Democrats on board, citizens of Alaska who overwhemlingly want drilling, enviornmental groups endorsing this, and only Tom Daschle holding out. Hm.

As for the ‘years’ it’s going to take to make oil flow in ANWR, if that really is the case, then perhaps we should begin to line it up. When dealing with oil markets like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, realizing the unstable situation of the Middle East in general is important. Sure, right NOW the oil’s flowing, but tensions are high over there and embargos have already started by Iraq (from whom we import 1,000,000 barrels a day if I am to believe the morning news) continue or worse, increase? The fact is, ANWR exists, it’s a resource we should start setting ourselves up to use in the event that the foreign oil we now depend on for more than half of our petroleum is no longer available. By ‘short term’, I’m also not talking about one or two years. I’m talking about something that if we take time and set it up will be available in, let’s say 5 years, then we at least know we have a plan. If we don’t do any sort of exploration at all, we start from scratch in the face of Middle Eastern embargos? I’d rather we start now with 2000 acres and be prepared for the situation in the ME to deteriorate - which it seems to be doing based on my own (unscientific) observations of the news.

36

You answer your own question below.

2004 is still a ways off and a lot still has to happen before anything firm shakes out (Think back to when you first heard the name Bill Clinton). Still the dems realistically have only two or three names out there to this point.

No argument at all. A political also-ran is not the way he wants to be remembered. His main problem for now is that he can only freelance and some people are bound to make a big deal of the “hole in his resume”

37

Well, gosh. :slight_smile: But I would thank Al Gore for making the speech. I was surprised, as well.

38

There’s an economic concept called “elasticity” that covers this. Some products (e.g., gas and cigarettes) tend to enjoy fairly constant demand regardless of price. You can significantly raise the tax on cigarettes with usurious taxes and only make a minor dent in their consumption. Other products are highly sensitive to price changes, such that a small increase in price will drastically decrease consumption.

The “welfare queens” themselves aren’t in the meetings, but the corporations (yes, corporations whose raison d’etre is collecting charity money, skimming their operational expenses, and passing on the rest) certainly have their representatives there. Witness the recent campaign finance reform movement, which had its own well-funded foundation (whose name unfortunately escapes me).

Apparently, special interests are those groups with whom you disagree? If you’re on their side, it’s just the public interest or something. There are classic republican-supported interest groups such as self defense and senior citizens. Similarly, democrats (stereotypically) support other special interests such as the NEA, unions, and the environment.

Gore is practicing some fancy politics with redefining concepts. In his language, the energy industry is a special interest whereas environmentalists (Sierra, etc.) don’t fall into that category.

39

Shipping Radioactive Material: What IS the appropriate way to ship it?

When I was a kid they built the WIPP(waste isolation pilot project) site in New Mexico pretty much as far from anyone as you can get in this country and still people complained about it, though it was in a desert salt mine a mile below the surface. People are going to bitch even in the face of the most effective solutions.

What is this CAFE standard?

I thought Gore’s speech was good, I liked hearing a lot of what’s been on my mind.

This dependency on Petroleum products is getting to be ridiculous. Not to mention cutting school funding ever, for any reason, is just sick.

Erek

40

Sam,

Well, I am not sure you and I are quite qualified to hammer out all of the details of effective policy here. As far as I know, we both do this in our limited spare time and without research assistance.

I also have a few problems with the deal as proposed:

(1) I think today’s gas prices are still heavily subsidized, so I would like to see an increasing tax over time (which you admittedly do entertain). Also, if you tax to fix prices at a given level, what is the incentive for oil companies to drop their prices below that level? I.e., it sort of screws up the demand curve because they no longer gain more customers by going below the floor. Or, maybe you were thinking of a more approximate way of doing this?

(2) Who is disallowing the construction of new nuclear power plants? Did someone implement a moratorium on new construction while I wasn’t looking? They aren’t being built because they aren’t cost effective. [In France, where costs for nuclear are about the same, but costs for fossil fuels are much higher, they are actually being built, BTW.] So, you would actually have to subsidize to get them built. [Or impose carbon taxes on coal and natural gas…the main competitors.] By the way, oil is now down to supplying only 3% of electrical power generation in the U.S.

(3) Finally, after reading up more on the CAFE [which stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy, mswas] standards, I am not ready to dismiss this option yet. Here is a link to the findings and recommendations of the NAS report: http://books.nap.edu/books/0309076013/html/111.html#pagetop. They think CAFE standards are effective, although they do recommend some changes (such as allowing trading of fuel economy credits), many if not most of which I believe were implemented in the Kerry / McCain bill, which also seemed to leave some of the details open for the executive branch to decide [see the bill’s text here: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_bills&docid=f:s1923is.txt.pdf and an article about the bill here: http://www.ens-news.com/ens/mar2002/2002L-03-08-06.html.]

But, I think we might be able to work out some sort of “deal”.

Indeed. In the previous thread on the CAFE standards [really on the CAFE standards :wink: ] last month, we discussed this issue. Someone brought up the point that demand for gasoline is fairly inelastic, as you note, and used this to argue that this means CAFE standards are a better approach than taxes on gasoline since they would have to be huge to have a significant effect on consumption. Unfortunately, even while being supportive of the CAFE standards, I am not sure this particular argument holds water. The thing is that while I think the short-term demand is relatively inelastic (because people won’t change their driving habits much), the long-term demand is probably more elastic (because people will tend to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles if prices are higher). Since the CAFE standards have a long-term effect (what new cars people buy), I believe it is more reasonable to compare their effect to the long-term demand from gas taxes. In fact, in some ways gas taxes might be quicker to implement since there is a lag in how fast the auto companies can start to introduce more efficient cars…I believe the McCain/Kerry bill didn’t even start phasing in the new CAFE standards until like 2007. There are, however, still some reasons one might favor CAFE standards over a gas tax, in my opinion. Actually, both might be good!