Some Nukes: can nuclear power make a comeback? (Hendrik Hertzberg/The New Yorker)

[wtmusic]

"Once the unpleasantness at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had had a little time to recede, America discovered that 'the atom”' wasn’t all bad. The bomb, yes—it was terrifying, as terrifying as a hundred 9/11s. American children got the wits scared out of them at school by being made to prepare for Armageddon by ducking, covering, and shutting their eyes tight lest the fireball melt them. Grownups were nervous, too, especially after 1949, when Stalin got his bomb. But in December of 1953 President Eisenhower went before the United Nations General Assembly to tell all mankind that the mushroom cloud had a silver lining. His plan, dubbed Atoms for Peace, promised 'abundant electrical energy' for everyone.

Who could doubt that shining vision? Certainly not Lewis Strauss, Ike’s chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who predicted that nuclear technology would guarantee that 'our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.' Not Walt Disney, whose “Our Friend the Atom,” featuring a cartoon genie, entertained millions of schoolchildren fresh from ducking and covering. More surprising, in light of subsequent developments, Students for a Democratic Society, the paradigmatic organization of the new student left, had no doubts, either. S.D.S.’s founding document, the Port Huron Statement, issued in 1962, fretted at length about the Bomb. But among its Rousseauian “blueprints of civic paradise” was this:

Our monster cities, based historically on the need for mass labor, might now be humanized, broken into smaller communities, powered by nuclear energy, arranged according to community decision.

<>

"Carl Pope, the executive chairman of the Sierra Club, has said that Obama’s nods to nuclear “may ease the politics around comprehensive clean-energy and climate legislation, but we do not believe that they are the best policy.” But the best, as often happens in our sclerotic political system, may not be among the available choices. As we stumble our way toward an acceptable approach to energy and climate change, the merely good might be the best that we can get."

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/03/22/100322taco_talk_hertzberg

A quibble: "Converting mass to energy by atomic fission in order to achieve temperatures normally found only on the surface of stars like the sun and then using that extraterrestrial heat to boil water..."

Nuclear reactors operate at the temperature of the surface of stars? :crazy:

[jtuck004]

1. "the unpleasantness "? Well, as long as he doesn't minimize it... n/t

[NNadir]

2. Um, how can it make a "comeback" when it was the fastest growing form of energy for the last 20...

...years that is not dependent on the dumping of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere?

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table27.xls

All one needs to do is to compare 1987 with 2007, although the math might be very difficult for anti-nukes who, when they don't know what they're talking about, just make stuff up.

The growth of nuclear energy actually outstrips the entire production from the flaky, unreliable and delusional wind and solar industry.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/international/iealf/table17.xls

All one needs to do to see this is to be able to compare two numbers, add and subtract, multiply and divide, but apparently that's way too difficult for some.

[Name removed]

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