Maine Owl

Ms. Owl: But wind energy doesn't make the Republicans wet their pants.

She's got that right. This is why it's hard to imagine how a Republican president would be worse than Obama on energy.

Obama Nuclear Plant: President To Announce Loan Guarantee For More Than $8 Billion

With the nuclear industry poised to begin construction of at least a half dozen plants over the next decade, President Barack Obama announced the first loan guarantees Tuesday, casting them as both economically essential and politically attractive. He called nuclear power a key part of comprehensive energy legislation that assigns a cost to the carbon pollution of fossil fuels, giving utility companies more incentive to turn to cleaner nuclear fuel.

"This is only the beginning," Obama said in designating the new federal financial backing for a pair of reactors in Burke County, Ga., to be built by Atlanta-based Southern Co. Obama's budget would triple ? to $54.5 billion ? loan guarantees available for new nuclear construction.

The federal guarantees, authorized by Congress in 2005, are seen as essential for construction of any new reactor because of the huge expense involved. Critics call the guarantees a form of subsidy and say taxpayers will assume a huge risk, given the industry's record of cost overruns and loan defaults. Reports by Congressional Budget Office and Government Accountability Office have estimated that the risk of default for new nuclear reactors could be as high as 50 percent.

Two gigawatts of wind turbines probably would cost half that, using a guideline of $1.5 million to $2.0 million per megawatt for wind. And the taxpayer would not be responsible for nuclear waste.

Here in Iowa we have a couple of thousand wind turbines now, about the size of a couple of nukes. I'll take wind any day of the week.

Obama is leading a boondoggle. Shame.

We'd call it just "terrorism" if it was done on our soil, wouldn't we?

Under Obama, more targeted killings than captures in counterterrorism efforts
By Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick | Washington Post
Sunday, February 14, 2010

When a window of opportunity opened to strike the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa last September, U.S. Special Operations forces prepared several options. They could obliterate his vehicle with an airstrike as he drove through southern Somalia. Or they could fire from helicopters that could land at the scene to confirm the kill. Or they could try to take him alive.

The White House authorized the second option. On the morning of Sept. 14, helicopters flying from a U.S. ship off the Somali coast blew up a car carrying Saleh Ali Nabhan. While several hovered overhead, one set down long enough for troops to scoop up enough of the remains for DNA verification. Moments later, the helicopters were headed back to the ship.

The strike was considered a major success, according to senior administration and military officials ...

Perhaps the worst moment in the State of the Union speech given by President Obama ten days ago was this statement

President Obama: But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. [emphasis added]

What else irritates me about this is an attitude found in many quarters of the physics community that nuclear power is an obvious solution to our energy problems. For example, this just came in the "What's New" email post from from Bob Park:

ALTERNATIVE ENERGY: THE PRESIDENT'S CALL RAISES SERIOUS CONCERNS. Last week in his State of the Union address the president called for increased generation of nuclear power and offshore drilling for oil and gas. Who could argue?

Park's "concerns" actually are important ones, namely that making fuel from food crops will be unsustainable given the size of the human population when surplus turns to shortage.

But to address Park's question--Who could argue?--here is Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). Makhijani explains how Obama has abandoned campaign rhetoric about reducing nuclear power use over time, and how he failed to explain how nuclear power is an economic loser:

Further, while expressing concerns about deficits, the Obama administration is opening the spigot for more loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants because Wall Street won?t finance them. They are just too risky. A single project is often more costly than the entire net worth of many electricity generating companies. They don?t want to bet their companies on nuclear. But they are OK with betting taxpayer dollars. Given that the underlying relationship between energy demand and economic growth is changing (quite apart from the recession), many nuclear projects are likely to be abandoned. Some already have been. This would be "d?ja vu all over again." Every nuclear power plant ordered after the first energy crisis in 1973 was abandoned, leaving ratepayers and bondholders on the hook. This time it will be the taxpayers.

Nuclear power is a long-term disaster for the environment and it never will build out enough to be our energy savior. It makes no economic sense as it requires boatloads of taxpayer money and crazy levels of protective public policy for the nuclear industry even to exist.

HERE is an audio program from the archives where Dr. Makhijani laid it all out about nuclear power a couple of years ago at the University of Maine. IEER is a leader in showing how wind and solar could be a sufficient energy source for the future--if we make the right decisions now. Unfortunately with Obama in charge, there is no sense we are going to do anything other than repeat the mistakes of the past.