interesting smokey.

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For most, electricity has become as important as food, water, shelter, or transportation. It is provided by large companies that make very healthy profits. These companies produce electricity by burning coal or oil or natural gas to produce steam for the dynamoes . Yes, some do harness water or natural ground steam, as well as solar and wind. I have seen another method though, that would help solve two of society's problems at the same time. Producing electricity and disposing of our mountains of garbage. Burn the garbage to produce electricity ! Recycleable items would also be reclaimed and the money used to help run the plant. I have seen one of these plants built and put into operation.
It quickly pays for itself in lower operating cost and at the same time helps to lessen the growing problems disposing of garbage. Technology has provided answers to smoke and odor problems. It is also a solution that big oil and big coal will do most anything to see go away. The plant that I witnessed was built on Federal Property .

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I sometimes wonder what we'd be doing with electricity now, and how cheaply we'd be doing it, if we hadn't gone all wacko about nuclear power a few decades ago.

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Nuclear Power is not "wacko". Building plants on known fault lines is. Well managed and cared for nuclear power plants are a definite national asset. The garbage fired power plant may be the best idea that has come along in a long while. Not only does it provide needed electricity, but it also provides an alternative to creating garbage mountains. Of course the Oil and Coal companies don't like the idea. 😄

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By "gone all wacko about nuclear power", are you referring to the building of nuclear power plants or the ANTI-nuclear movement? Are you thinking of improved nuclear generating? Or more advanced alternative sources?

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Tex,
Safely built Nuclear Power plants , IMO, are a very good thing. I may understand better than many as I worked for years as a Federal Civil Servant working on our Nations great Naval Ships. I was a nuclear certified Pipefitter and was trained /worked on naval nuclear power plants. I worked on every type ship from Aircraft Carriers to Submarines.

It does concern me though when greedy, shortsighted Electric Companies build Nuclear Power plants on poor sites.
Japan picked a piss poor site in Fukushima and some U.S. sites will, I fear, prove to be disasters waiting to happen.

Anyone that has their own Solar or Wind power are to be saluted. 👍

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You're preachin' to the choir, Smokey. I was just wondering which of those two opposing meanings Wade was implying. I'm sure he will tell us - and damn eloquently too.

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I wasn't criticizing nuclear power. I was criticizing a regulatory approach to nuclear power that means that ground hasn't been broken for a new nuclear plant in this country since the 1970s. That's forty years, or two generations of time.

And, cynic that I am about the American people's addiction to ever more mommy-and-daddy-protect-us-from-every-danger-and-every-bad-guy-type regulation, I find it hard to believe that we'll ever build another.

Nuclear power isn't wacko. A regulatory approach that has made it too expensive to build ANY new nuclear plant in over two generations -- that, IMNSHO, is.

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Well, were all glad you cleared that up before you went off to California to saw down the last great Redwoods or Start an open pit mine in the middle of Yellowstone National Park. I'm sure you were glad back in 2008, during the last Republican Administration, when unregulated mega companies placed America and much of the world into a Recession that tettered on near Depression. Perhaps returning to polluting our rivers and streams again could help already greedy Corporations make even larger profits.

Exactly, precisely what regulation is it that is directly making your life so unbearable. There are still some of us that give a damn about more than just our own bank accounts .

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Sigh.

Look, you want to know why I'm so opposed to the American propensity to regulate? Because, just like your last paragraph here, Smokey, it gets the burden of proof backward. It shouldn't be *my* job to show empirically that particular regulations are a sufficiently bad thing. It should be yours to show empirically that restricting my choices is a good enough thing.

And I defy *anyone* to justify the scope of regulation that Americans go along with. We're talking on the order of 100,000 pages of regulation *every damn year*, and that's just from the Feds. Add in state, county, and city regulations, it's simply loony to say that "Wade, you should be the one to disprove their value." Yet we go along with it, bitching and moaning about whichever regulation hits our particular hot button, but perfectly willing to be okay with the other 99% of those thousands of pages of rules that interfere with our neighbors.

IMO that is more obscene than the film output of Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson and everyone else in their industry, plus all the money Americans spend on alcohol and drug abuse, combined.

I teach for a living. My bank account is so fucking good, and the below-market salary I have been paid for the last 25 years, and my own bad decisionmaking so pervasive, that I'll be lucky if I can retire at 75.

I can handle a sucky bank account. What honks me off more than just about anything is that, either because I've been bad with money or for any other reason, people think its perfectly fine to restrict my choices without asking me first and then have the utter gall to tell me that *I* need to justify to *them* why they shouldn't do so.

Read the damn Declaration of Independence again. The rights come first. The government comes second, for the purpose of protecting those rights. It gets power only after the consent of the governed is given. It doesn't get to say, "hey, citizens, show me why regulation of your freedom is a bad idea." It is presumed to be a bad idea unless and until those who would govern demonstrate otherwise.

And showing it is a "good idea" should take a lot more than saying "Well, Wade, you're a fuckup if we let you decide." That's undoubtedly true -- but absolutely and positively, in the Jeffersonian vision anyway, irrelevant.

Sorry, Smokey, on this one you pushed just about the hottest of my hot buttons.

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