Chronicles in Advocacy: Tell It to the Wind

We don't share as many negative editorials with you as we used to because a.) there just aren't as many as there used to be and b.) the list of arguments is pretty short and tends to get repeated over and over. That's as tedious for us to keep rehashing as it is for you to read it.

So this editorial from the High Country News ("for people who care about the west") did not raise hopes for some original debate:

Then there is always the risk of a meltdown if we resume construction of nuclear power plants. Many Americans probably don’t remember or have never read about the meltdown of the Three Mile Island power plant in the 1970s. Its cleanup took from 1979 to 1993, and cost ratepayers, taxpayers and stockholders around $975 million. To paraphrase cowboy poet Wallace McCray, reincarnated nuclear power in this new century “ain’t changed all that much.”

Well, you get the picture. But what struck us is the ID for the author:

Russ Doty is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is the chief operating officer of New World WindPower in Billings, Montana.

Right off the top, we think that op-ed writers ought to advocate the manifest benefits of their favored energy generator and not go after their cousins.

Nuclear and wind are sort of distant cousins (twice removed by marriage, perhaps) because nuclear doesn't pair well with wind farms - nuclear plants are efficient enough that ramping down plants when the wind picks up isn't a very efficacious use of either wind or nuclear - so we get why a wind power guy might like to keep a nuclear plant out of his neighborhood. But that's not what's motivating the editorial officially and we find hiding behind long discredited arguments a little - distasteful.

Wind power looks to be getting a big boost in the next presidential administration - whoever wins - so there's a lot for the industry to tout - and a lot of country for nuclear and wind (and solar and hydro and etc) to share. We're all in it for the common good - let's leave it at that.

A view of the prairie. Seems like a lot of room for a wind farm or two.