Harry
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Keith,
When I was involved with nuclear I ran into an interesting comparison in Chicago. They used coal, oil, and nuclear power plants. The engineer in charge made the point that of the three nuclear provided the cheapest power, and also had the least downtime.
He did point out that had he been able to use local "dirty" coal, ten coal would have been cheapest. Bringing "clean" coal in from the West pushed coal power above nuclear.
Two political problems have dogged nuclear. First, keeping a $5 billion plant from operating while 2-3 years of court antics take place is no way to run a business. The plant is already heavily in debt when it finally starts operating.
Secondly, if they had been able to drop their spent fuel rods in the ocean trenches instead of keeping them on site - the present expensive and risky situation would never have developed.
Also, the new nukes are apparently efficient and very safe. You didn't believe they could be run with the coolant off, but I've seen it happen. They don't even need containment shelters. To me, they seem to be the key. Environmentalists are perhaps in a state of shock - these horrible things don't even emit that well-known plant food - CO2.
Privatization in Britain demonstrated that the conservatives had no firm philosophy. This included Thatcher, who did some good things but inevitably began to guess at what to do in the absence of a solid understanding of the free market. In any event, I suppose had she tried to do something significant, she would have been stopped. Meantime, the idea of privatizing monopolies is beyond belief.
Harry
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Keith wrote:
At 10:33 22/12/02 -0600, Bruce Leier wrote: <<<< Harry, I do not know of any energy technology that did not get its start and/or a big boost through subsidies of some kind. Oil certainly did. And nuclear really did, too. Do you say those subsidies were "bad"? Or is it only new subsidies that are "bad"? What has changed other than who are the economic royalists? WWHGsay? >>>>Oil certainly did not get a start through government subsidies. In the modern era, it began with a group of private investors in late 1854 who engaged a brilliant Yale chemist, Prof Silliman, to look into the properties of the black stuff which oozed out of the ground in many places. Once Silliman's report was written, the group raised the money and the first oil company was founded -- the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company. All without a cent of government subsidy. The nuclear industry has certainly required vast government subsidies because it has been a hopelessly uneconomic proposition from the start. In terms of ongoing costs it may, in fact, become economic in a decade or two for a brief period as oil and gas prices start to rise but it would still need vast government subsidies because private investors can never afford to cover the costs of cleaning up afterwards. The privatised nuclear industry in the UK, launched without having to pay a penny towards its original development costs, has recently gone bankrupt for the second time. And it will continue likewise as long as it operates. Only second and third-rate chemists and engineers commit themselves to a career in the nuclear energy industry. Keith Hudson
****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of LA Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (818) 352-4141 Fax: (818) 353-2242 *******************************
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