Re[2]: [at-l] A.N.W.R. VOTE - conservation issue - not trail

[cleek@cleekhouse.com (Billie H. Cleek)]

Hey, folks -- When you respond to someone's post it's helpful if you use
an indicator to show what it is that you're respoding to, and the absence
of one to indicate your response:

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Bryan Kramer wrote:

> Huh? You mean it had nothing to do with the fact that California
> increased energy demand by a factor of 2 or 3 but built no new power
> plants, for 23 years, because the environmentalists blocked any new
> plant construction? Or it couldn't be because the environmentalist got a
> law passed that made the electric distribution companies buy all the
> power that alternative power producers, wind and solar for example,
> could produce at three times the cost of other power? And it couldn't be
> the fact that environmentalist forced almost all fossil fuel plants in
> the state to convert to natural gas. So when natural gas prices blipped
> up it caused energy prices to rocket up? 


See how easy it is?

> California was an example of environmental wackos working hand in glove
> with the cut-throat capitalists to produce a disaster that none wants to
> take credit for.

I bet even you can do it.
 
>     California was the victim of a boondoggle aimed at forcing it to
> retreat from any attempts at becoming environmentally sound. The
> companies responsible are suddenly coming up bankrupt and
> uninvestigated... 

Without a combustion engine...

>     What I don't like about this is the cynical inference that
> environmentalism better come up with the goods or we'll keep on smoking.
> When I look at this picture I don't see environmentalists as the threat
> here... 

or even an unsightly wind mill...

> 
>  What bunk, I've seen the engineering report on Three Mile Island and it
> was never near melt down. If you knew any nuclear engineering you would
> know that no US reactor could ever melt down because of the design.
> These are slow neutron reactors and without water you have no slow
> neutrons. Thus if you lose all the water from a reactor it just shuts
> itself down, period. You might get some damage to the internal structure
> of the core and so they certainly don't want that to happen but a
> disastrous release just won't happen.

But not without a minimal effort.

> You should look at the Army SL1 reactor which suffered a catastrophic
> failure with instantaneous loss of all water from the unit. This unit
> had NO containment and was inside one of those sheet metal warehouse
> type buildings. There was zero escape of radioactive material despite a
> major steam explosion. There was NO meltdown. There were three
> fatalities, the three guys working on the unit were killed mainly by the
> steam explosion.
>  
> Russian reactors BTW do not have this inherent stability that US plants
> do. They copied a WWII design from Hanford Washington using graphite
> moderator that is basically unsafe. No plants using that design have
> been built in the US for 50 years.
>  
>  
> 
>   *** I like the sound of it, but Three Mile Island was within a half
> hour of total China syndrome melt down and containment breach. A clever
> engineer ignored the info he was seeing and guessed correctly. If Three
> Mile breached, the ensuing Chernobyl-like radiation dusting would have
> rendered major portions of Pennsylvania and the northeast uninhabitable
> for decades. This would have included a large section of the AT and its
> watershed... 
>  
> Again this is just PC hogwash, look at the natural reactors in Gabon for
> real numbers.
>  
>  
>    Storing the large amounts of waste you propose is an issue unanswered
> as of yet. The half-life underground in the Nevada mountain storage
> would be 10's of thousands of years. Maybe that's why they haven't done
> it?    
>  
>  
> Absolutely H2 is a good idea, however the only practical way of making
> major quantities of H2 is  nuclear power. Hydrogen has a major drawback
> BTW it is almost impossible to store in large quantities because of its
> very low density. 
>  
> Bryan 
> 
>     I'm in favor of new hydrogen-based fuels with few emissions. That
> way we can drive anything we want without guilt. 
> 
>    The bottom line is what are we doing with nature...? 
> 
> 
> 
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