From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Aug 04 2002 - 13:00:54 MDT
http://www.spectator.org/AmericanSpectatorArticles/TuckerNuclearMay-June.htm
<<What is the engine that keeps this Ecotopia running? Nuclear power. An
amazing 70 percent of the electricity generated in Vermont is nuclear—the
highest proportion of any U.S. state. Reliable Vermont Yankee's reactor in
Brattleboro supplies a third of Vermont's own power and exports the rest to
neighboring states. Coupled with cheap hydroelectric power from Quebec, this
enables Vermont to keep its lights lit, yogurt cold and computers humming,
while burning almost no coal, oil or natural gas to generate electricity. The
state's largest carbon-based fuel is wood, which powers 5 percent of the
grid...>
and
<<Second, America now has a retrogressive aristocracy marching under the
banner of "environmentalism." As Thorstein Veblen predicted a century ago in
The Theory of the Leisure Class, an industrial society will eventually
generate a class of people who are so comfortable with the established order
that they will oppose any further material progress, even though they
themselves might benefit from it. At a certain point it becomes more
important to prevent other people from climbing the ladder behind you than
ascending any further yourself. As Veblen put it: T
The exigencies of the general economic situation . . . do not readily
produce, in the members of [the leisure] class, that degree of uneasiness
with the existing order which alone can lead any body of men to give up views
and methods of life that have become habitual to them. The office of the
leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve
what is obsolescent.>>
and
<<One ambitious state tried to do without both—coal or nuclear. California
under Governor Jerry Brown planted its feet firmly on Amory Lovins' Soft
Energy Path. In his 1976 book by that title, Lovins stated that: 1)
centralized electrical generation was inherently inefficient; 2) conservation
and small industrial co-generation plants would get us through a "transition
period," during which central generating stations would be phased out; and 3)
solar and other renewables could be ramped up to take over around 2025>>
and
<<Extracting enough hydrogen by this method to power our transport sector
would mean doubling or tripling current natural gas production. Are there
reserves enough to support this? Lovins has a simple answer. He subscribes to
the yet-unproven theory of Cornell astronomer Thomas Gold that natural gas
deposits are essentially infinite. Gold argues that gas, oil and coal are not
"fossil fuels" at all, but the remains of methane that were trapped in the
earth's core when the planet was formed 4.5 billion years ago. His theories
are certainly intriguing and could indeed be true. But if natural gas is
essentially infinite, then a lot of energy strategies become plausible. "I
don't know why Lovins needs to convert to hydrogen," says Gold. "You can just
use methane." (Lovins, remember, does this to eliminate the greenhouse
gases.)>>
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