Monthly Archives: September 2014

Nuclear power as solution to Climate Change? Quite the reverse

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This essay summarizes the argument that nuclear power has significant burdens on the carbon footprint. Nuclear power should not be seen as a green energy. There is a nice illustration showing how nuclear power is dependent upon carbon for the entire manufacturing process.

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Nuclear solutions to climate change are anything but, Aljazeera Americaby Gregg Levine   @GreggJLevine 23 Sept 14 “……While major climate polluting nations such as China, India and Canada have declined to send a top-level official to this year’s summit, the U.S. was expected to go all in, with President Obama touting his recent proposals to curtail the nation’s carbon output.

That plan to limit CO2 production has already come under fire from fossil fuel-friendly corporations, trade groupsand politicians who balk at the regulation, and from climate scientists and activists who point out that the president’s plan does not do enough to meet the maximum-2-degrees-of-warming goal, but a group you will not hear complaining is the nuclear energy sector.

Buried in the proposal and absent from many initial reports on the plan is a series of programs and pledges thatencourage the preservation and possible expansion…

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Nuclear Renewal; the Vampire must be fed

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There was a story in the New York Times today that President Obama dedicated a new nuclear plant is being constructed near Kansas City, MO.  The article says:

It is part of a nationwide wave of atomic revitalization that includes plans for a new generation of weapon carriers. A recent federal study put the collective price tag, over the next three decades, at up to a trillion dollars.  This expansion comes under a president who campaigned for “a nuclear-free world” and made disarmament a main goal of American defense policy. The original idea was that modest rebuilding of the nation’s crumbling nuclear complex would speed arms refurbishment, raising confidence in the arsenal’s reliability and paving the way for new treaties that would significantly cut the number of warheads.

Sources: National Nuclear Security Administration, Government Accountability Office

Supporters of arms control, as well as some of President Obama’s closest advisers, say their hopes for the president’s vision have turned to baffled disappointment as the modernization of nuclear capabilities has become an end unto itself.

“A lot of it is hard to explain,” said Sam Nunn, the former senator whose writings on nuclear disarmament deeply influenced Mr. Obama. “The president’s vision was a significant change in direction. But the process has preserved the status quo.”

Nuclear madness continues with this trillion dollar grant.    The other news we hear from Missouri is from Ferguson, where poverty is so rampant.