Sunday, February 12, 2017
I'm With These Guys
Here is an article from the American Council on Science and Health which makes a lot of sense. Not perfect sense, mind you, but in the main they are right. I'll summarize: Small, fail-safe nuke reactors; drill, baby, drill in the meantime; and, if there is a break-through in solar technology and battery storage in the future, we can start the switch to that renewable then (despite the myriad problems with it even if there are such break-throughs);
Screw wind power--ugly, noisy, fickle, delicate, useless totems to the religion of man-made global warming. Oh, and the blades kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year. You have to wonder, reasonably, if its supporters hate birds and bats.
I part ways with the American council at #4, throwing more federal money at research in solar and fusion. When I was a boy, fusion power plants were 30 to 40 years away. 50 years later they are still 30 to 40 years away. Not everything imaginable is achievable. I've always been troubled also by the inherent disconnect with fusion. So we re-create a miniature version of the sun and then we use it to boil water. Really? That's the plan?
But the biggest disagreement is over who should do the research and who should pay for it. The Council says the federal government should. The federal government couldn't find its ass even if it used both hands. The private sector as always is the creative force in our semi-capitalist economy/society. How much money we throw at the research would be a question of utility. I'm OK, as usual, with reasonably amounts spent on pure research with an emphasis on useful things. How promising the research seems would of course tilt us towards spending more federal money. Right now, the taxpayer money paid for solar and fusion research should be quite small, no more than a couple of hundred million a year. Let the people with the most to gain from success pay their fair share (which is almost all of it).
Screw wind power--ugly, noisy, fickle, delicate, useless totems to the religion of man-made global warming. Oh, and the blades kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats each year. You have to wonder, reasonably, if its supporters hate birds and bats.
I part ways with the American council at #4, throwing more federal money at research in solar and fusion. When I was a boy, fusion power plants were 30 to 40 years away. 50 years later they are still 30 to 40 years away. Not everything imaginable is achievable. I've always been troubled also by the inherent disconnect with fusion. So we re-create a miniature version of the sun and then we use it to boil water. Really? That's the plan?
But the biggest disagreement is over who should do the research and who should pay for it. The Council says the federal government should. The federal government couldn't find its ass even if it used both hands. The private sector as always is the creative force in our semi-capitalist economy/society. How much money we throw at the research would be a question of utility. I'm OK, as usual, with reasonably amounts spent on pure research with an emphasis on useful things. How promising the research seems would of course tilt us towards spending more federal money. Right now, the taxpayer money paid for solar and fusion research should be quite small, no more than a couple of hundred million a year. Let the people with the most to gain from success pay their fair share (which is almost all of it).
Labels: Sound Energy Policy
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 12:56 PM 
