Re: Global Warming in the comics?


Talk about answering your own question! I suppose you think Chernobyl is a
myth.

*No. It was an accident waiting to happen, the result of Soviet-style
planning and administration. A reactor like Chernobyl will never be
built again, unless thrown together in a backwards country like Cuba
or Libya or North Korea, and in my opinion the construction of a badly-
designed reactor should be cause for world action--UN sanctions,
invasion, whatever (most likely, twenty years of resolutions passed by
the UN that don't do anything, but that's another issue).

Where do you live? Have you campaigned for a nuclear waste dump in your
hometown? Would you object if the government wanted to store some barrels in
your basement?

I'm a tree-hugger of long standing. I see a future for nuclear energy, but
man, does it have bugs to work out.

*Back to the jingoism, eh?
As a matter of fact, I had to deal with a planned hazmat/nuclear waste
facility being planned on a railroad line owned by a museum I belonged
to--long story short, we would have had cars of waste rolling 50 feet
from our museum. As a railroad group, we took an officially neutral
stance on it (the stuff would be rolling on the RR or the highway, and
the RR was the safer mode by far). The locals protested it into
oblivion, naturally, and we're still getting lease payments from that
corporation......... (I still pity our museum president; he was also
the local fire chief and regional emergency management coordinator AND
an expert on waste management, and depending on which hat he had on at
the moment, he was neutral, opposed to, or in favor of the proposal!)
How much is the government offering me to store the waste, and at what
levels? Money talks.

Look, we're all condemned no matter what we do to get power. Solar?
Cloudy Seattle and Scotland shut down, don't they? I'm downwind from
several coal power plants; I haven't heard much about that acid rain
that was destroying our planet lately. Oil feeds terrorists and/or
destroys the Arctic polar bears. Wind turbines are bird Cuisinarts.
Ain't enough geothermal to go around (hey, I just thought of a use for
the Centralia, Pa. mine fire!!!!). Harnessing wave power will
probably destroy aenome/otter/seal/fish habitats. We can't grow
enough biomass to replace the energy demands, or if we do we're raping
the Amazon rainforests or destroying the planet through runaway
industrial agriculture. Yes, we need an alternative to the status
quo, and I do my part and am willing to do more. But I prefer the
alternatives that don't apparently have the long-term goals of doing
away with Western civilization and/or the eradication of Homo Sapiens
as a species on Earth.
(Hey, you like jingoism? I can do it too.)

The problem is that in the case of nuclear power the problems are
concrete--the high enormous initial costs and a container of nuclear
waste--whereas in the case of coal, natural gas, etc. the problems are
far more abstract--acid rain, greenhouse gases, the long-term problems
of strip mining or mine seepage, etc. There just ain't no such thing
as a free lunch, as the saying goes, and at some point (the sooner the
better, IMO) people are going to recognize and accept that the
concentrated problems of nuclear are an equivalent or better option
than the uncontrolled problems of coal/oil/etc.

Do you support Iran's nuclear power?

*In abstract terms, sure. The problems there are political and not
technical. If I want to be totally snide about it, we let Israel have
nuclear power plants, don't we?

Hey, they're cutting down a tree in the park across the street from
me, you'd better go hug it.


.

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