I sure hope Dukakis finally fights back.
*** Update ***
Dennis Kucinich just went nuts over nuclear power, saying it is unsustainable and not an option. I am reasonably sure I know his position on fossil fuels.
That means, if Dennis Kucinich becomes President, your options to stay warm in the winter boil down to slitting open a tonton or solar power on the three days each winter the sun is out.
*** Update #2 ***
Obama is not ready to be President. The only real choice this year (since the Republicans are all absurd) is between Dodd/Edwards/Clinton.
I am with Dodd, for now.
chopper
peter johnson probably thinks it’s greenwald’s fault.
Zifnab
BARRASSO
Wait they have debates now? When did this start? Go Kucinich’s hot wife!
Perry Como
Total FLILF.
STEVEinSC
This is the wittiest and funniest blog, period. Thank you John Cole! I don’t know how you keep it up, but whatever the magic is I hope it is without limit! Where were you before? Your metamorphosis is like Jim Webb’s!
Paul L.
If the democrats all attack Hilary, will the New York Times report it as “picking on a woman” like they did when she debated Lazio?
daniel rotter
“Paul L.,” did the N.Y. times actually write the words “picking on a woman” in describing Lazio’s criticisms of Clinton during their debate, or is that just your critical characterization of the paper’s reporting of said debate? Just curious.
Breschau
Can someone please tell Hillary that laughing when someone points out that you just gave the Worst President in History the first (and possibly only) needed step in bombing Iran is just not working for her?
Flag lapel pins? Funny. Selective editing? Funny. A second pre-emptive war? Not so funny.
Dreggas
She doesn’t care. She is doing it because she thinks it is smart politically, she doesn’t give a fuck what the people think. This is another reason she should be kicked to the curb and stop being treated like she is inevitable.
Ben
Hear hear on nuclear power. It produces some pretty nasty waste, sure, but not very much of it, and it releases no CO2. It’s the best option we have in the near future. Security is the one thing that does worry me.
Cinderella Ferret
You all are welcome to move down here to New Mexico for the winter. Big Bill is a strong proponent of alternative energy, but we haven’t see much of our Governor lately. The rumor is he’s running for Vice President.
Krista
Jesus H. Christ, John. Between you and some of the commenters, it’s not safe to take a drink of coffee while reading this blog anymore.
Breschau
I say thee, nay, Sir. Instead, we shall all bask in the hotness of his wife.
Gus
What, doesn’t the wind blow in the winter?
RSA
Not quite either; it’s recycled freeper commentary:
Dreggas
Well shit we know how Kucinich keeps warm, he just nestles himself between wifey’s….err…”Warmers”…
Breschau
What this alleged “debate” needs is one good “E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!” cheer from the crowd. That’ll shake things up.
Breschau
Seconded. He has gotten my only non-local political contribution of the year (and Biden is from my current home state).
Remfin
A little history may help John…
Kucinich is “crazy Kucinich” because he claimed CEI was conspiring to force the city into debt to get “Muny Light” for a steal. 20 years later…they found out exactly that when documents came to light during I believe a bankruptcy.
Who are CEI? Well, now they’re part of FirstEnergy, and were brought into the fold along with the Davis-Besse Reactor they owned. The FirstEnergy that almost had a horrific nuclear accident there a few years ago. The kind of accident often claimed can’t possibly happen to US reactors and why it’s claimed they “can’t do a Chernobyl”. As an extra bonus the “further material problems” referred to in that oh-so-neutral Wikipedia tone is talking about an incident where they almost restarted the reactor…with no running water to cool it and no way to get any in. Another one of those “it can’t happen here” scenarios.
Kucinich has a good reason to distrust power companies…
Dreggas
Is he doing that badly?
John Cole
He was, but I quit watching. Denny Crane came on at ten.
Dreggas
Oy and I had such high hopes for him but lately it’s been one slip after another. I am liking what I’ve been hearing from Dodd I just hope we don’t get stuck with Shillary.
Dreggas
Oh and as far as Kucinich goes (I heard he recently said he was talking with aliens or saw some the space kind no less) I will give him credit for one thing. He has been very much in favor of clearing the air regarding UFO’s and what the government does and doesn’t know. Yeah I know call me a crack pot but there are things that I wouldn’t put it past our government, no matter who is running it, to cover up and this is one of the big ones.
Ninerdave
So two “almost” accidents, one referred to in your wikipedia link to your liking, the other not and Kucinich is sane and nuclear power is the greatest detriment to society since the burka.
Nice.
Cain
“slitting open a tonton” hahaha.. I think it was more funny for me because I just recently saw the Robot Chicken StarWars episode .
cain
The Other Steve
It’s not clear to me how this was smart politically.
Or is this supposed to be her Sister Soljah moment, where she proves she’s not beholden to special interests?
It doesn’t seem to be working.
I fear she might be naive on this, but she seems to be going with the “A President needs options” even if it is that fucktard George Bush reasoning.
No war with Iran yet, and I don’t see the drum beat working.
The Other Steve
As nutty as Kucinich is, he’s still more competent than George Bush.
Dreggas
Ummmmm about those drums
stickler
Jumping Judas Iscariot, OtherSteve:
My half-blind Australian cattle dog is more competent than George Bush, and only because she can still find her own ass with her nose. Kucinich would be an improvement, and I am convinced that he’s nuts. That’s where our glorious Republic is, unfortunately, in October of 2007.
matt
I can’t figure out why Obama sucks so badly during these debates. Youtube any video of him being interviewed one on one, and it’s like wow, I would follow this guy anywhere. But he’s simply horrible in this format. So disappointing.
Xenos
Damning with faint praise…
Dug Jay
Stay tuned for a nice bit of publicity for Senator Dodd courtesy of the LA Times, perhaps as early as Thursday.
Mason
God help me, John, if you actually vote for Hillary Clinton I am just going to put the barrel to my temple and pull the fucking trigger because the end of the world cannot be far behind.
Breschau
So, they have time to ask what Obama is wearing for Halloween, but they don’t have 2 minutes to cover telecom immunity? *THE* hottest topic on the blogs last week, with Dodd taking the lead – and a major goddamn news network cannot aim one question towards it?
Okay, that’s it – we’re in Versailles. We cannot deny this any longer.
mrmobi
Didn’t see much of the debate. What I did see (as far as the moderators) was fairly disgusting. Someone clue me in as to when we’re going to have debates about the actual issues, and not the horse race itself. This will save time, and I won’t have to look at Tim Russert more than necessary.
John Cole:
Nice major oversimplification there, John. Kind of reminds me of necocon talk about how we have to “secure energy resources in foreign lands.”
Oil is running out, fast. Will nuclear energy be a viable option as a short-term solution to our problems? Of course.
But is nuclear power it the ultimate solution? You’d have to be terminally stupid to believe that. We haven’t even figured out how to safely dispose of the waste we’ve created so far (not in my back yard!). Dozens of nuclear facilities around this country have full pools of deadly waste. (Mind if we drive this train full of highly enriched uranium by your house, on those poorly maintained tracks?)
Keep in mind that, despite lies from folks like Sean Hannity, the nuclear power industry in this country is responsible for at least a dozen deaths since its’ inception. Keep in mind also that we live in a country which seems unable to maintain its’ infrastructure. Once built, nuclear power plants become part of that infrastructure. Any of this ringing a bell?
Are you guys aware that in the event of a major nuclear power plant disaster in the US, by federal statute, survivors are limited to $10,000 for each life lost. Courtesy of the Price-Anderson Act. Seems like nuclear power may not be as safe as some would have us believe. Not as safe as slitting open a tonton, anyway.
John Cole
A dozen whole deaths? Inconceivable:
And that doesn’t even take into account the other deaths related to fossil fuels. That is just extracting the shit.
I am aware of the problems with nuclear energy. I am not suggesting we go live with reactors run by Homer Simpson, with no long range plan for waste removal and disposal/storage.
But nuclear energy is still our only good option for the future right now.
Perry Como
Clinton v. Giuliani. I’d root for injuries, but this is for our fucking republic.
John Cole
I hate the idea of voting for her, but I really don’t know what choice I have. The Republican party needs to be stopped, and that is ground enough not to vote for the GOP candidate. That all of the Republican candidates are worthless, ranging from the maddeningly indifferent fred Thompson to the utterly deranged and depraved Giuliani (and I am not talking about his social life, which I have no qualms with) to the completely and wholly unprincipled Mitt Romney.
just who the fuck am I supposed to vote for in 2008?
Hntrr
I don’t understand all the hate for Obama. I thought he did well.
Ryan S.
He had a rough start but he finished well, however, I think Dodd did the best job based on pure performance. I have to say I loved the UFO question, and Obama’s segway onto something serious was perdy good.
Ryan S.
Ahh, You missed the best parts. Obama’s Halloween question, Clinton’s oops, and the UFO question.
mrmobi
John, I hope you’re not under the impression that the nuclear industry in this country is run by supremely competent individuals, because it’s not. My god, there’s a “fast breeder” reactor in the suburbs of Detroit that’s permanently sealed in concrete after it exploded and nearly melted down decades ago. The simple dynamics of operation make nuclear facilities hotter and hotter the longer they run. (Many are now running decades past their originally estimated lives) It’s very expensive to keep them clean. How do you think Homer Simpson’s boss would deal with that problem? The answer is, he doesn’t have to, because the NRC is run by Republican hacks, like every other US agency of government.
You are also forgetting that we are going to remove the mountaintops from most of West Virginia (after first carefully depositing them in the valleys where people live) before we get into building the dozens of new nuclear facilities which will create even more hazardous nuclear waste we still don’t know what to do with.
That mountaintop removal mining will kill hundreds more people than nuclear power has (mostly non-miners, children, etc), to this point. But that’s ok, because people from those rural areas don’t have enough teeth, and they vote for Republicans, so fuck ’em! (I’m just paraphrasing somebody who posts here).
So, no, John, nuclear power is not our only good option. All of the good options would require subsidies, but would be sustainable (wind farms, co-generation, real public transportation, etc). There are more good ideas about how to turn our energy policy around than you can shake a stick at, but they all require politicians who are willing to make policy which isn’t strictly for the benefit of giant power companies.
Nuclear power is sustainable, if you can ignore the fact that we haven’t yet permanently stored any of the waste created to this point. The reason for that is, we have to find a way to store this deadly material for almost one hundred thousand years.
We can’t even keep our bridges standing for more than a few decades.
glasnost
John’s opinion that Obama blew it might be enough to make me actually watch, but I doubt his blowing it was in any serious form, or there would already be articles on it.
It’s not between Edwards and Dodd, John. It’s between Hilary and Obama. Are you sure his alledgedly substandard debate performance tonight really disqualifies him to be president? Maybe you should find something you don’t like about his policy positions first, eh?
TenguPhule
The Son-of-a-bitch touched the third rail of politics after making kissy face with a Religious Gaybasher. The fork has been stuck in him, he’s fucking finished.
We have enough problems as it is without letting a Democrat reopen the way for Bush to destroy Social Security.
scarshapedstar
Well, hate to break it to ya, but it isn’t. There seems to be this popular belief that a fission reactor is a zero-point energy generator that runs until the end of time on a gram of uranium. They use up quite a bit of fuel, and we couldn’t run the country for 100 years on nuclear alone.
mrmobi
Color me disillusioned. I’ve been a supporter, but Obama really seems to have lost his way. There is no Social Security crisis, and I’m pissed as hell that he chose that issue to try to take on Hillary. Damn it!
Hillary sounded good to me tonight, but I didn’t see that much of the debate.
Surabaya Stew
Obama is not ready to be president? Can anybody define what “ready to be president” is? Not being qualified to be president is 1 thing to argue, but he looked pretty “ready” to me!
ConservativelyLiberal
If Kucinich were to win, damn right his wife would keep us warm in the coldest winter. Damn she is hot! I saw her on MSNBC today, and that is one beautiful woman. I see that and wonder how Kucinich (let alone myself) ended up with wives that can boil water with looks alone.
/drool
Dodd is my guy too, John. Hillary! is not even a close last. But I really hope that Al Gore jumps back into the fray. I don’t think he will, but I can always hope. Even he may look at this clusterfuck that Bush/Cheney made and say ‘No way’, not in a million years.
TenguPhule
Corrected. Obviously John’s deprogramming into the Liberal Brotherhood needs more work.
Nuclear Energy in the US is a fucking joke. We are no Japan or even a France. These people simply can’t be trusted to build, run or maintain these plants.
Aside from the whole waste issue, there’s also the amount of water those things need to run. We’re having a little problem with getting enough for people and crops as it is, what do you think a whole new generation of those nuclear plants across the country will do?
Wind, Wave, Solar and Garbage conversion are our best bets at the moment. They’ve already come up with a way to turn pig shit into oil with a net energy gain (no joke).
If we could only get some actual real money interested in long term gain over short term profits, we’d be well on our way to fixing things.
Peter Johnson
You are right about that. I feel like saying Julianne Moore’s husband called and he wants his wife back.
TenguPhule
Must not be stupid enough to buy into an argument that Bush pushes.
Failure is not an option.
DougJ
I must say that for someone who’s new to Democratic politics, you’re remarkably on target.
Obama had me and then he lost me…when he played into the punditspeak about Social Security. I’m leaning towards Edwards now, though maybe Dodd.
TenguPhule
I think this is Kucinich’s idea of encouraging population growth the old fashioned way.
Rick Taylor
I’m afraid I’m beginning to agree with you, though I’d really like to vote for someone who didn’t support the Iraq war going in. Doesn’t support wars of aggression against nations that are no threat to us and that are virtually assured to tie down are army for years if not decade while undermining our policy objectives and give inspiration to our enemies doesn’t seem like such a big thing to ask. I think I’m still voting for Obama despite his mis-steps; the invasion of Iraq was such a huge blunder, I don’t want someone who supported it as President.
My Truth Hurts
I don’t like any of the candidates in either party but If George W. Bush was ready enough for you to be President in 2000, I don’t see why Obama isn’t ready in 2008. Unless you mean not ready to clean up after the guy you voted for twice has made, because I concur that will require superhuman feats of intelligence and strength. GWB has fucked everything up so badly we’ll need Superman to fly around the Earth and make time go backwards.
I find your commentary entertaining and sometimes insightful John, but cosidering your voting record, I’ll have wait a few cycles before I take any of your endorsements seriously.
Evinfuilt
Repeat after me..
We can recycle nuclear waste. We choose not to in the US.
Other countries recycle their waste, producing more power, and reducing the actual amount of waste.
Even if we didn’t recycle the waste, the amount put out by a Nuclear Power plant is less than what is pumped into the air by a coal fired plant. The difference is you can see it, touch it, bury it. The radioactive waste that coal plants put out goes straight into the air, and we get to breath it.
Why don’t we recycle waste in the US?
Because we’re afraid… You see, the process to recycle nuclear waste brings it into a state where it can also be used as fuel in a weapon.
Other countries know this, but they add proper security, and recycle the fuel so that they don’t pollute.
I’m sorry, but because I don’t buy the Anti-Nuclear FUD, I can’t support any Presidential Candidate who is 100% against it.
Each year more people die from Coal Mining than have ever died from Nuclear Power. Those *almost* accidents, weren’t accidents in the end. Nuclear is safe, otherwise we wouldn’t use it on our Aircraft Carriers and Submarines, with ridiculous uptime. The key will be that it has to be government run, and needs proper safe guards, security and a waste recycling process.
If the French can do it, why can’t we? Because they’re smarter and less afraid than us.
LITBMueller
Yeah, but a series of Giuliani-Biden Debates would be fucking epic.
demimondian
Oh, but there are 87000 gallons of high level radioactive waste lying around in America from reprocessing! It’s terrible, terrible, I tell you.
Never mind that the small home office I’m sitting in right now (roughly 10X12X10) has a volume of 8,976.62334 gallons, and that 87,000 gallons would fit — comfortably — in a chamber 40X40X10, leaving enough space between the containment barrels for neutron and alpha-particle absorbing shielding (usually called paraffin, although sometimes referred to as paper). After all, reprocessing is the devil’s toy!
No, no, we must never use nucular power. It’s dangerous. The sky ghost told me so!
Billy K
I would just like to say, yes Cole is on a roll, and I attribute it to his new Macintosh. Is the timing just a coincidence? I think not. It’s the only explanation.
Billy K
Stargate nerd.
http://www.gateworld.net/omnipedia/technology/z/zeropointmodule.shtml
liberal
Re nucular energy, some blog commenter once claimed that if the entire world consumed energy at the rate the US does, we’d run out of uranium.
I’m not sure of the claim, but it’s an interesting one:
(1) Uranium is not nearly as rare as people thought earlier in the 20 C, but it’s a finite resource;
(2) We could actually use it up in a relatively short amount of time.
IIRC, one way to get better use of the stuff is to use breeder reactors. OTOH, those things are a major proliferation risk.
liberal
Evinfuilt wrote,
How do you know the security is really that good?
And while maybe the US would use pretty good security, the weapon proliferation issue must be regarded as a serious “con” for fission (reprocessing in particular) if we’re talking about powering the whole world.
Finally, if you ask what the worst possible man-made disaster that could hit the US (or any country using nuclear power) is, the answer: a terrorist using a nuke on a fission plant. If they actually vaporized the core, it would make a huge swathe of the US uninhabitable. (At least according to an article I read in Sci Am years ago.)
Not saying that nuclear power ought not to be used. But it has some definite cons.
(One thing I don’t quite understand, however, is the issue of the waste. Suppose the waste completely leaked out in 10,000 years. Are we talking about a major corruption of biosphere, or just somewhat higher cancer and mutation rates in part of a continent? Latter doesn’t seem like that big a deal.)
BIRDZILLA
MORE PEOPLE DIED IN KENEDYS CAR THEN DIED AT THREE MILE ISLAND and liberals are a bunch of screwballs
Evinfuilt
This makes me proud :)
Seems there’s still proper education out there. A college student understands Nuclear better than most people. I think he puts it in easily digestible terms.
Also, catch the link to his earlier video, where he actually talks about waste and security.
If Edwards and Kucinich would just put modern Nuclear Power back on the table, its part of the cure for our Energy woes. Sadly I fear Edwards took it off simply to highlight Biofuel, which makes the corn growers so gosh darn happy.
The Other Steve
Liberals are fucktarded when it comes to nuclear power.
They hold pretty much the same stupid attitude as republicans towards gay. They don’t understand it, they’re scared of it, and they lash out at it.
demimondian
liberal — right now, we use slightly enriched uranium for our power plants (except in Canada; CANDU runs on natural uranium). That’s already been enriched roughly 100-fold, and yet, even then, the world uses only a few tens of thousands of tons of natural uranium each year — most of which is u238 that is extracted from the natural uranium and discarded. The total recharge amount due to refueling is far, far smaller than that.
Even throwing away 90+% of the material and not reprocessing, as we do now, there is a waste pile from a phosphate mine in Florida that contains about 90 years’ supply of LWR food. That waste pile has been sitting in the sun and rain for 50 years, and it’s only one of many such piles around the world. (No, there will never be a spontaneous chain reaction in the pile. The unranium concentration is in the 100 ppm range.) If we shifted to natural uranium reactors, that would go up to almost a millennium. If, in addition, we reprocessed, we would be talking many millennia — from that one pile of mining waste.
And that’s without touching the great deposits of high quality ore around the world.
By the end of each power cycle, about 25% of the energy generated in a second-gen LWR is actually generated from the fission of plutonium, by the way. In fact, one of the factors which limits the length of the power cycle is the inevitable brightening of the reactor as plutonium gathers in the fuel rods. The amount of fissile material in a fuel rod rises over time, and eventually becomes larger than the design can tolerate.
As to “the security”, the security is atomic. There is an isotopic uranium contaminant in spent fuel which make it essentially useless for bomb manufacture. Uranium 236 (which arises from U235 absorbing a neutron, or from the alpha decay of Pu240) is a huge neutron sink, and it doesn’t fission with thermal neutrons. In a power plant, that’s no big deal, since it becomes U237 in that case, which *is* fissionable, although slowly. In a bomb, however, it’s death, because it consumes the neutrons in the initial burst, thus slowing down the exponential growth of the chain reaction, and thus preventing an explosion.
If the uranium and the plutonium in the spent fuel are kept together, the result is useless for a uranium bomb because of the U236, and the amount of plutonium in the fuel is small enough that it would take a vast amount to build a bomb.
As to the fear mongering stuff about hitting a nuclear plant…it’s FUD. TMI suffered a complete core melt down — despite which, the primary containment vessel held. There’s a lot more heat and energy in that case than there is in the impact of a plane on the secondary containment vessel of the plant. If you want real terror, think about what would happen if any of the major chemical plants in the Uniter States were made into terror targets. *That* should have you shitting your pants.
Evinfuilt
I don’t have to. I moved to Dickenson, Texas (yes I regret it)… To the east of me is Texas City, you can just search “Texas City” and “explosion” to understand that the chemical plants are a huge security threat.
And thats just with in 5 miles of my house in 1 direction. I also have Pasadena, which is miles of explosives lined up in a row.
BUT!!! The big but. Across the bay is Baytown, and their main source of power is Nuclear. If I recall, its Matagorda Country (where Bay Town is) thats getting that brand new Reactor in the next 5-10 years (depending on how much the nut jobs get in the way of saving us from ourselves.)
James Aach
FYI: One of the difficulties in the energy debate is that people have little “gut feel” for our energy sources – how they work, their pros and cons, risks, etc. I know this is true in my own field of nuclear power. It is far different than what most pundits, politicians, reporters and academic experts on all sides of the issue think. (And yes it has its good points and a lot of bad points.)
I believe we’ll make better decisions about our energy future if we first understand our energy present. So I wrote “Rad Decision”, a thriller filled with the typical mayhem that also covers power generation basics and nuclear in particular. It is available at no cost to readers at http://RadDecision.blogspot.com (reader reviews are in the homepage comments) and it’s also in paperback at online retailers. (I get no royalities.) Stewart Brand, National Book Award winner and founder of The Whole Earth Catalog was kind enough to say “I’d like to see Rad Decision widely read.” James Aach
daniel rotter
Hey, “BIRDZILLA,” you also forgot to mention that more people died when Laura Bush ran a stop sign with her car than died at Three Mile Island. Just my stab at bipartaniship.