Well, perhaps if we had opened up ANWR there would be less need for offshore drilling. Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power, apparently under the delusion the alternative is Living in Harmony with Gaia rather than coal and oil.
ANWR would need decades to begin production and even then would produce only modest amounts of oil. Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state. Since the people generally opposed to government funding and control of industry on a massive scale are not usually liberal, your comment is of questionable veracity.
> Nuclear power has proven to be extremely expensive; I am not aware of any country that generates a significant fraction of its power using nuclear power plants without massive investment and control by the state.
"control by the state" is a choice. Many countries have national oil companies, but that tells us only that they like national oil companies as other countries have private ones.
The "massive investment" for nuclear power is well within the capabilities of many US companies. For example, at least three of the California utility companies can afford it. (PG&E has at least one. Sacramento used to and at least one of the LA basin companies is bigger than Sacramento's company.)
Note that at least some of the "expense" is also a choice. We spend a lot of money on nukes that has nothing to do with safety or power production.
I'll agree that nukes could be safer, but as long as we're spending money on things other than safety, I reject the claim that safety is a high priority. (And yes, some of those things are driven by folks who scream "safety".)
Well, eating is a choice. And yet I choose to eat every day. The word 'choice' conveys very different meanings: everything we do is a choice, but many of our actions are highly constrained. After decades of nuclear power development, no one earth has successfully run a nuclear power system without massive government funding or control. That suggests that we don't know how to do such a thing.
The "massive investment" for nuclear power is well within the capabilities of many US companies.
Not in anything that looks like a free market. Right now, the federal government provides very large subsidies to nuclear power operators. As a result, we've had...no new nuclear power plants built in the last three decades. In the absence of the massive government subsidies we have in place now, I don't believe there are any utilities that could afford to build a nuclear plant on their own or secure the necessary financing.
Note that at least some of the "expense" is also a choice.
And yet nuclear power is very expensive all over the world. Nuclear power plants are almost always over budget and late no matter where they're built. When different people all over the world keep making the same mistakes, at some point, you have to consider the possibility that all these mistakes are not just random individual failures but reflect intrinsic properties of current reactor technology.
We spend a lot of money on nukes that has nothing to do with safety or power production.
> After decades of nuclear power development, no one earth has successfully run a nuclear power system without massive government funding
PG&E does. So do the other private power companies in the US that have nukes.
> or control.
What do you mean by "control"? The US does regulate power companies, but it's unclear that such regulation makes it possible for them to run nuclear power plants.
> Right now, the federal government provides very large subsidies
Nope. It limits their liability, which is different. If you think that their without-such-limits liability is close to correct, the liability that we apply to other power sources is hugely wrong (on the low side).
Which reminds me - are there any privately operated power producing dams in the world? If not, then surely hydropower .....
Ok, but then to be fair a substantial portion of the defense budget should be counted as subsidies to oil companies.
I've heard this before and it makes no sense to me. The US spends a lot of money on defense because Americans love the military and use it to funnel money into all sorts of places that would otherwise be quite poor. And most US military operations around the world don't do anything to reduce the price of oil. I mean, Iraq is not exactly giving us oil for free now is it?
The French seem to not be starving.
True, they're not. But the original claim was that liberal opposition to nuclear power was the problem. My counterclaim was that you will find zero support amongst American conservatives for a nuclear power policy anything like the successful one used in France. Can you point to any important American conservatives who publicly speak favorably about the France's nuclear system and advocate for adopting it in the US?
And large projects being late and over budget is not at all surprising, regardless of the field.
I have friends that do design and construction for power plants and, according to them, the cost and schedule overruns in nuclear plant construction really are surprising.
> My counterclaim was that you will find zero support amongst American conservatives for a nuclear power policy anything like the successful one used in France. Can you point to any important American conservatives who publicly speak favorably about the France's nuclear system and advocate for adopting it in the US?
So what?
Note that US conservatives do support more nuclear plants like the ones that we have.
It's also fairly easy to find conservative support for nuclear power under a variety of other circumstances.
Yes, France does use reprocessing, but the US nuclear power industry didn't ban that here.
Do you want to argue that the French system is cheaper because the French govt is not subject to the review cost that US companies must pay? Or is it that the French govt doesn't have to pay certain "in operation" costs by virtue of being a govt? In either case, imposing those costs is clearly a choice.
BTW - You can't damn someone for not going along with an "authority" unless you accept said authority. In other words, by suggesting that we should agree with said conservatives in all things, you're saying that you do.
> I mean, Iraq is not exactly giving us oil for free now is it?
Good point.
Suppose that you wanted to use the US military to get cheap oil. Would your plan for doing so have anything to do with how the US military is currently deployed?
Or if liberals hadn't spent the last several decades demonizing nuclear power...
I've seen plenty of demonization of nuclear power, but (in my experience) there's a correlation with level of education (less education => more nuclear outrage) rather than a political left/right correlation.
I'm genuinely curious about this. Are there any stats to back up your assertion that liberals demonize nuclear power?
Only an idiot would even suggest that. It's one of the few remaining wildlife refuges in the world that's still truly wild, and if we destroy it, we might as well just give up and admit that our grandchildren will be living in acrylic domes surrounded by a toxic hellhole.
Again, the choice is not "despoil the environment, or live in a pristine world of magic and unicorns". We need energy, and lots of it. So we can continue our current lousy policies, or look for alternatives which while not perfect are clear improvements. I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill.
Drilling is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an improvement. It is rather a continuation of the lousy policies that we're already destroying the world with.
The answer is not more drilling, the answer is better ways to produce energy.
"I'm pretty sure that the entire drilling operation in a tiny portion of ANWR would do substantially less damage than this one spill."
Until there's another spill... this is the real world; there WILL be more spills, and in place like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, all it would take is one.
