- How America got stuck on nuclear stupid
- Is it facts and science or nuclear stupid?
- America’s decline and recovery from nuclear stupid (charts)
On an average day most Americans use or are served in some way by dozens or maybe even hundreds of things/devices powered by electricity. You just expect the electricity to be there. About the only time you give it a thought is if one of those things/devices doesn’t work, there’s a power outage, or maybe when you pay your electric bill. That’s the way it supposed to be. Electricity is a utility and an enabler of modern society that’s just supposed to be there when you need it.
Most people have plenty of things on their mind other than how electricity gets generated or how it gets from where it is generated to where you, as a consumer, need it. Then again until recently most people had plenty of things on their mind other than a ballooning national debt, out of control scope and size of government, job killing taxation, and government officials pretty much just ignoring the Constitution. We have been so poorly served by our elected representatives that ‘We the People’ have had to invest more and more of our own time; digging deeper into these issues and getting more involved in politics. It hasn’t been helpful that the lame stream media has been in cahoots with the Political Ruling Class as an enabler of misreporting and distorting about the true cost of government policy and programs.
Nuclear power policy and regulation implemented by the U.S. government over the past 30-40 years has cost us far more than most people realize; policies that have squandered our nuclear power plant design and technology competitive advantage versus the rest of the world. How bad is this nuclear regulatory morass created by our government? It now takes at least 6 years to get approval to build a new nuclear power plant. Following the approval at least it takes between five and eight years to build a power plant if you’re lucky. That’s an eleven year cycle at best but more likely closer to fourteen years.
How does that compare to what the rest of the world is doing? Japan is building nuclear power in less than four years. Not only that the Japanese do it for about half of what it will cost to build a new nuclear plant in the U.S. Are we supposed to believe that the Japanese are so less concerned about nuclear safety than we are that they are willing to sacrifice safety to bring a plant on line in less than half to one third of the time that it takes to do the same thing in the U.S. today?
We the People need to educate ourselves about our government’s failures in terms of energy policies and understand what that is costing us. After food, water and oxygen the next most important ‘must have’ item in a modern industrial society is electricity. Electricity from “renewable” sources such as wind, biomass, or solar will not provide the quantity of electricity needed to maintain and grow the U.S. economy in the near future or the distant future for that matter. These renewable sources can’t even survive in a free market without large taxpayer subsidies.
Ask yourself if “facts and science” are what has caused us to throw away our vast superiority in nuclear technology. Or is it “nuclear stupid” that has created a regulatory morass so deep that it takes two to three times as longer at twice the cost to build a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. versus what it takes in Japan?
