Clean Energy

Fire of Liberty
William Rusher, former editor of National Review and a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute, has a wonderful column over at WorldNetDaily. Rusher noted that while the US media seems to be preoccupied in purporting a supposed "energy crisis" because the price of gas and heating oil are going up but fail to note that various activists in the United States are so blinded by their belief in "the cause," that they prevent individuals from solving our energy problem or using clean sources of energy. As you know, the environmentalists talk a good game in solving our energy problems but when it comes to putting the solutions in their neighborhood they seem to join the Not-In-My-Back-Yard (NIMBY) cheering section. One area they seem to take an active stance against is nuclear energy. Here's Rusher's take on the environmentalists take on the subject of nuclear energy:

Of course. There is always – and always has been, for the virtually past half-century – nuclear power: a source of energy that is literally inexhaustible and (unlike fossil fuels) virtually pollution-free. As a matter of fact, back in the 1960s when the environmentalists were first warming up, and zeroed in on coal and oil as the villains that were polluting the environment, their lawsuits always included canned paragraphs pointing out that there was a splendid source of energy available that caused no pollution whatever: nuclear power!

Later the environmentalists revised their pitch and stopped promoting nuclear power, since it involves radioactive waste products that require careful disposal. Instead, the American people were encouraged to assume that every nuclear power plant was a ticking atom bomb that might "go off" at any time, killing hundreds of thousands of people. This fear may have been bolstered by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Ukrainian Republic of the former Soviet Union, but the International Atomic Energy Agency's years-long investigation concluded that design flaws, the flouting of safety procedures and the lack of a "safety culture" among the Soviet administrative agencies resulted in the disaster, which spewed radioactive material into the environment and has been linked to dozens of radiation-related deaths.

But the safety of nuclear power generation in America deserves to be legendary. Even the famous accident at Three Mile Island killed not a single soul. As a matter of fact, there has never been so much as one radiation-related fatality in any American commercial nuclear power plant. According to some studies, sharing a common wall with the San Onofre nuclear power plant will contaminate you with less radiation in a year than you can get by living in Denver.

What's more, France, Japan and Taiwan (to mention only three examples) leave the United States in the dust when it comes to relying on nuclear power. Yet in the United States the hysteria against nuclear power plants roars on, and not a single new plant has been constructed in three decades. The industry has been forced to content itself with maintaining those already constructed.

You'd think these folks in the environmental fight would welcome a pollution free energy source that would eliminate all pollutants that create their much ballyhooed bogeyman "global warming." Let's hope cooler heads will prevail and convince firebrand environmentalists like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greenpeace that we have clean sources of energy and it's known as nuclear energy. Then again, they'd lose the whipping post and would fade into the ether which no self respecting environmentalist(especially a Kennedy) is willing to do.