The high cost of energy is the Democrats' fault

The BBQ Pit
1

…per this ‘town hall’ phone call I’m on from Bob Latta, R-Ohio.

Every possible amount of blame is being laid at the feet of ‘the majority’, ‘the other side of the aisle’. ‘They’ won’t let us drill for oil (typing as I listen - the Anwar preserve/reserve - can’t hear well), ‘they’ won’t let us build nuclear power plants, ‘they’ won’t let us use coal…the EPA is evil, etc, etc.

I particularly liked the call from the man from Paulding who asked 'how can we let the Democrats know that the cost of gas is killing us?" Apparently he thinks Democrats are all rich and out-of-touch with reality.

I can’t muster up a good ggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr because I’m too busy listening. Would someone do it for me?

Oh, the theme of the call is 'we must drill - we have to take care of our own."

2

Oh, the mandated raise in MPG standards is not achievable because we do not have the technology available yet. Alternative sources of energy are unworkable. This guy is amazing. I think I’ll vote three or four times for him next time he’s up for election. (I live in a small county in Ohio, it should be doable.)

3

So far, what he is saying could be translated as, “I fear the changes that are going to happen so I’ll stick my fingers in my ears and say alalalalalala and hope it goes away.”

There have been stupider platforms, god help us all.

4

I think I put this in the wrong place. But it was too good not to share and I couldn’t call my husband because my line was All-Bob & His True Believers.

I enjoyed the call way too much to be angry, even the part where he managed to blame Bill Clinton for something and totally ignore his party’s time in power, where they could have corrected the outrageous wrong. The whole thing was better than Last Comic Standing. I hope he calls me again so I can hear him on the war or the economy.

5

[QUOTE=Suse]
Oh, the mandated raise in MPG standards is not achievable because we do not have the technology available yet. Alternative sources of energy are unworkable. This guy is amazing. I think I’ll vote three or four times for him next time he’s up for election. (I live in a small county in Ohio, it should be doable.)
[/QUOTE]

Why isn’t this place a paradise after the last seven years?

-Joe

6

Obstruction by the Democrat Party. Steamroller tactics.

7

Actually I do blame the democrats somewhat. If they could stop sucking off all the enviro-asshats maybe we can do something.
Look, I want a clean planet also, but if you want sustainable growth with less greenhouse gases it has to be nuclear. Sorry, but that is the fucking reality at this time.
Hydrogen is wonderful! Ok, how are we supposed to produce it you fucking weenies? If anyone says solar or wind power, you lose all credibility.

If we want an all electric car society then we should be building nuclear plants…like yesterday.

8

The white house seems to have taken down their piece on Cheney et.al’s National Energy Policy. It used to be here, where can now be found Bush’s latest energy campaign fluffery.
However, back in May 2001 Cheney, and the nationol energy policy development group, released the administration’s National Energy Policy, available here as pdf.
As I can see every time I pass a gas station, or pay the electric bill, seven years later the policy is an abject failure.
Yet up until early 2007 the president had a congress ready to rubber stamp his every whim. He and his Republican friends screwed the pooch on energy.

9

Did I defend the Bush administration at all? I hate them all. Forgive me if I don’t throw flowers out to the Democrats, ok?

10

[QUOTE=gravitycrash]
If we want an all electric car society then we should be building nuclear plants…like yesterday.
[/QUOTE]
I agree so long as we address the waste storage issue. And to the first person who suggests we just leave it onsite in storage ponds, their credibility equals that of the anti-nuclear environmentalists.

11

[QUOTE=elucidator]
Obstruction by the Democrat Party. Steamroller tactics.
[/QUOTE]

As in lying in front of the steamroller and having little bits of their crushed bodies gumming up the works? :smiley:

12

[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
I agree so long as we address the waste storage issue. And to the first person who suggests we just leave it onsite in storage ponds, their credibility equals that of the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve always wondered why we can’t just dump it in space.

If anybody can keep from tripping over themselves in the mad rush to call me an idiot, I’m really curious about that. Is it too risky to send it up in a rocket into the great unknown? Is the stuff just too heavy?

13

[QUOTE=gravitycrash]
Actually I do blame the democrats somewhat. If they could stop sucking off all the enviro-asshats maybe we can do something.
Look, I want a clean planet also, but if you want sustainable growth with less greenhouse gases it has to be nuclear. Sorry, but that is the fucking reality at this time.
Hydrogen is wonderful! Ok, how are we supposed to produce it you fucking weenies? If anyone says solar or wind power, you lose all credibility.

If we want an all electric car society then we should be building nuclear plants…like yesterday.
[/QUOTE]

I agree 100%. If you aren’t for building nuke plants like it’s going out of style, than I have no interest in what you have to say about environmental matters. When people talk about new fangled green energy solutions, I point out that we figured out green energy in, like, 1951.

Nuclear energy is the only possible way to significantly reduce “carbon footprint” without lots of poor people starving.

14

It would seem this is going to be an argument/talking point we might be seeing a lot of this year. For instance, from Richard Viguerie, whom I believe is a fairly well-known conservative and has some pull in some circles. There’s a fairly succinct bullet-point list that I’ll quote in full:

[quote]
How did liberals accomplish these things?

They deliberately keep trillions of barrels of oil stuck in the ground, right here in the United States and offshore.[ul][li] Exploration and drilling for oil is banned in the Alaskan wasteland, even though the area proposed for such use is tiny – 2000 acres, an area smaller than Washington Dulles Airport, in a “wildlife refuge” of 19,600,000 acres, about the size of South Carolina.[/li][li]Of the 279 million acres of land under federal management where oil and natural gas could potentially be extracted, most is unavailable for exploration and drilling. Some 62% of all onshore lands are completely off-limits, and another 30% are tightly restricted.[/li][li]The government does not allow development of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.[/li][li]The government does not allow new drilling for oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, where there’s an estimated 86 billion barrels of undiscovered recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered recoverable natural gas. While U.S. companies can’t drill 100 miles off our shores, others, such as the partnership of Communist China and Cuba, can.[/ul]Meanwhile…[ul][*]Due to excessive regulation and environmental protests, not a single oil refinery has been built in the United States in over 30 years.[/li][li]For the same reasons, not a single nuclear power plant has been licensed in the United States in over 30 years.[/li][li]Liberal policies have tightly restricted the use of coal, which is abundant in the United States.[/li][li]Government regulations issued by liberals require that gasoline be reformulated for different regions of the country and different times of the year, causing simultaneous surpluses of some formulations and shortages of others, driving prices up and creating price disparities between different areas.[/li][li]Liberal regulations also require that gasoline blends include ethanol, which pollutes worse than gasoline, furthers the destruction of the rainforest so that land can be freed up for growing corn, and drives up the price of everything related to corn, from eggs (chicken feed is mostly corn) to soda pop (which is sweetened with corn syrup). By the way, about one-third of recent increases in food prices worldwide have been attributed to ethanol, which means that ethanol has put tens of millions of people in poor countries at risk for starvation. A tank of ethanol uses enough corn to feed a person for a year.[/li][li]Liberals raised taxes on gasoline so high that the government makes roughly four times as much on each gallon as the oil companies do. (Why doesn’t John McCain call that “obscene”?)[/li][li]And liberals hike oil prices indirectly by engaging in out-of-control government spending and over-regulation of investments, driving down the value of the dollar and making everything bought from other countries (such as oil) more expensive.[/ul][/li][/quote]

15

[QUOTE=Wheeljack]
I’ve always wondered why we can’t just dump it in space.

If anybody can keep from tripping over themselves in the mad rush to call me an idiot, I’m really curious about that. Is it too risky to send it up in a rocket into the great unknown? Is the stuff just too heavy?
[/QUOTE]

Both, essentially – it’s too expensive and risky. On the risk side, putting spent radioactive fuel on top of a giant tube full of explosives and then lighting them off is clearly just not politically feasible – even if you put all the waste in practically indestructible containers, if the rocket blows up it scatters those containers who knows where, potentially making the material available to terrorists. Or even to idiots or tinkerers who just want to take a peek.

Plus, those indestructible containers are probably pretty heavy, significantly reducing the payload of waste you can lift on a single rocket, making it more expensive.

And heck, there’s always the chance that we could develop some new technology that turns today’s waste into valuable fuel.

16

[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
I agree so long as we address the waste storage issue. And to the first person who suggests we just leave it onsite in storage ponds, their credibility equals that of the anti-nuclear environmentalists.
[/QUOTE]

Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with leaving it in swimming pools? Now, I don’t think that that’s the best idea, and you certainly have some security issues, but it seams like reactor site waste guarding is a pretty easy problem to solve compared to the alternative.

17

[QUOTE=T_SQUARE]
Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with leaving it in swimming pools? Now, I don’t think that that’s the best idea, and you certainly have some security issues, but it seams like reactor site waste guarding is a pretty easy problem to solve compared to the alternative.
[/QUOTE]

How many swimming pools do you know that are good, solid structures after fifty years without a drain and maintenance period?
The vast majority of the on-site waste storage facilities were built as temporary storage facilities to handle the waste until long-term storage facilities came online. As such we’ve got waste pools built in the fifties just outside (or even inside) some fairly major metropolitan areas. Including both NYC and LA.

I’ll admit some of the problems I’m alluding to can be addressed during construction, or with an aggressive maintenance and inspection program. But, at the same time, I still believe that is a stop-gap measure that is far riskier than transportation and storage in a purpose built long-term facility would be.

As for putting waste into space, ignoring the risks associate with launch, and that’s not a reasonable assumption IMNSHO, the simple costs are insanely prohibitive. It costs thousands of dollars per pound to put something into low earth orbit. And anything put into low earth orbit will eventually fall back to ground.

High earth orbit would still be better, but is also still unstable - it would be a bit of a crap shoot whether it would decay to a low earth orbirt, or if it it would become a free solar orbit. But it wouldn’t stay there forever.

When things go into free solar orbit, it’s even worse - because you’ve just created a new, and highly radioactive, Icarus object - an asteroid that’s crossing the earth’s orbit. Who knows whether it might be perturbed into a collision orbit as some point thousands of years into the future?

So, to get something into space, where it’s not a long-term hazard, basically you’re talking about crashing the waste into another solar body. Again, ignoring the desirability of crashing waste into craters on the moon, that’s going to be even more expensive because it requires more controlled targeting and more stages to get to even the closest celestial body, the moon.

Building solid gold pyramids to store the waste in would be cheaper, AIUI. (And since gold is nicely dense, and non-reactive, it would work if it weren’t for the need to consider idiot descendants who might try to steal the shielding.)

18

Well, ideally, we could process the waste stream, isolate and store the stuff like cesium and strontium until it decays enough (which would be pretty fast) and use the plutonium to generate even more energy. The problem is actually being able to get the separation.

Heck, we could even use thorium. In some ways it’s an even better choice than what we’re already using.

19

That’s also true, asterion, but even doing that is not enough for some.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the entire Left on this issue, but there is a hard-core which screams bloody murder every time anyone even thinks about nuclear, and ultimately we’ll need nuclear if we don’t open up more oil. “Renewable” energy is nice, but it will never and probably can never replace other energy sources. Period. I won’t bother to explain in the Pit, but there are limits.

20

[QUOTE=chorpler]
Both, essentially – it’s too expensive and risky. On the risk side, putting spent radioactive fuel on top of a giant tube full of explosives and then lighting them off is clearly just not politically feasible – even if you put all the waste in practically indestructible containers, if the rocket blows up it scatters those containers who knows where, potentially making the material available to terrorists. Or even to idiots or tinkerers who just want to take a peek.

Plus, those indestructible containers are probably pretty heavy, significantly reducing the payload of waste you can lift on a single rocket, making it more expensive.

And heck, there’s always the chance that we could develop some new technology that turns today’s waste into valuable fuel.
[/QUOTE]

Well summed up. It’s difficult, expensive and risky to launch heavy nuclear fuel in heavy safety containers into space. It’s complicated by the fact that there are only so many launch sites, and depending on where in outer space you want to send the rocket to, there are only so many places you can reasonably build a launch facility. So now you need infrastructure to transport radioactive fuel from all over the place to the launch site, with all the risks that entails.

The one other issue is just where in space you want to put it? Of course the answer isn’t to let it burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, so it has to either be a higher Earth orbit (which leaves a bunch of hazardous junk in potentially useful orbits where it could pose a collision or debris hazard), or on an Earth-escape trajectory. This means, again, extra expense from a bigger rocket, and then comes the next challenge.

Sure, space is big, but if you just chuck something into space near the Earth, there’s a good likelihood that it’s orbit will bring it back around to our neighbourhood again. An orbit out of the Earth’s orbital plane (the ecliptic) is less likely to intersect with the Earth again, but is hard to get to. We don’t want to crash it into any of the planets, probably, for fear of messing up future research/exploration/habitation/economic activities or affecting any local biosphere (the question still isn’t settled for Mars, yet). And dropping it into the sun seems like a nice idea, but it’s actually really fuel-intensive to get there, too.
So the best possibility is perhaps a solar orbit that steers well clear of the planets, and is relatively easy to get to. And then you run the risk of losing track of it, and, in the long run, having its orbit altered by the perturbations that the big planets produce. So perhaps just a solar escape trajectory, which is extra fuel-intensive.

So anyway, the upshot is, even if the rocket doesn’t blow up on the way to space, it’s not clear where you could sent it to cheaply.

Edited to add: Ah, I see OtakuLoki already covered this. Ah well.