Over at Washington Monthly's Political Animal, Steve Benen has a robust discussion going on about Mariah Blake's feature story in the Jan/Feb issue, "Bad Reactors: Rethinking your opposition to nuclear power? Rethink again."This post in the comment thread caught my eye.
Once I learned the science, I found that much of the left's objections to nuclear were unfounded. And I say that as a bona fide lefty in favor of single payer health care, a minimum income, and other things considered too far to the left for passage.
As for how long the nuclear waste lasts, the heavy metals and carcinogens generated by the tons daily from burning coal have a half-life of forever. It's not enough to say what's wrong with nuclear; you have to compare it to the incredibly destructive alternatives we're already doing on a planet killing scale today.
We can and I believe we will get past the downsides of nuclear. It will provide a base supply that can be supplemented by solar and wind, which cannot by themselves be the entire basis of our power generation because the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, and as mentioned above, batteries also have their downsides even if we were to be able to store the energy from solar and wind for their downtimes.
Posted by: Eclectic on January 26, 2009 at 8:51 AM | PERMALINK
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