Rusted Sky

I honestly believe that environmentalists are causing so many problems that they should almost be considered treasonous. I heard a great point yesterday on Glenn Beck's show that the environmentalists all want us to be clean, but they reject the idea of nuclear energy which is the cleanest energy source out there! I agree, it isn't the gas companies, its the self-righteous environmentalist types that are causing more problems.

I won't say that environmentalists haven't accomplished quite a bit of good - the air in most major cities is significantly cleaner than it was in the '60s, with a higher population. But as the saying goes "What have you done for me lately?" - and the answer needs to be something other than "We stopped drilling, and made gas more expensive, AND we fought nuclear power to a standstill!"

J.

In Buffalo things got far less polluted in the air when Bethlehem steel closed... of course the economy tanked for 15 years and still hasn't really recovered. But the energy use sure went down!

Even the co-founder of Greenpeace says that environmentalism is no longer about the environment and that the pollution from nuclear reactors is far preferable on the environmental side than fossil fuels. The lovely statistic on deaths that Jerry Pournelle consistently cited was that deaths due to cancer from the entire nuclear mining to storage area were less than those from radioactivity due to burning coal. Third and fourth generation nuclear power plants are designed so that even at the worst, you cannot get a runaway reaction.

Now if Robert Bussard can get the money to build a full-scale test Polywell fusion reactor, we will see all of his tests have come out correctly. He was the one that first described the TOKAMAK and helped on those, and now he has a bright new idea that hopes to actually achieve low cost fusion. He is a hard man to bet *against* as he has gone through the worst meat grinders on the planet for fusion: science fiction fans. I have attended a couple of scientific presentations where the number of high degrees in the subject is more than some nuclear physics departments have in total. SF fans love to tear things apart and see if they can *really* work.

Perhaps, soon, we can all get a 'Mr. Fusion' for our time traveling cars.