Something Controversial

The gasoline situation gnaws at me. If four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline isn't enough to convince people that it's time to get serious about ending our dependence on petroleum, I don't know what will. Five-dollar-a-gallon gas? Rationing? Half-mile lines at the gas pumps like in the 1970s?

One of the things that irritates me about this whole situation is that no matter what idea you have to reduce dependence on oil, one or another industry think-tank has experts that think your idea of the worst thing since liver-flavored Jell-O. In the end the industry experts seem to argue that nothing can be done to alter the status quo because the oil company executives and stockholders aren't sufficiently rich yet.

Well. There is a way to take a large chunk out of our dependence on petroleum and to eliminate - not reduce, but eliminate - carbon dioxide emissions. But as a liberal I'm not supposed to think its name, let alone say it. It is literally the N-word of liberalism: nuclear energy. Oh, I hear it already: "Oh my God! Three Mile Island, Rocky Flats, Chernobyl, two-headed chickens, plutonium in the water system!"

I'm not blind to the risks of nuclear power, and I recognize that it only takes one accident like Chernobyl to render the whole nuclear power industry a bad investment (and make no mistake, the Chernobyl accident is still going on, and will be going on at the very least until the final permanent sarcophagus is built and rainwater can be kept out of the ruined reactor building. And if the reactor building falls apart, or if the huge reactor lid falls over, and the sarcophagus fails, the original disaster will happen all over again except this time there won't be a graphite fire).

But I believe that properly managed, nuclear power alone of all the alternative energy sources has the capacity to make a serious dent in our petroleum usage. Nuclear power plants deliver huge quantites of power and they deliver it without carbon dioxide and without dependence on politically unreliable foreign fuel sources. Sounds good to me.

Is this where I have to stop saying I'm a card-carrying liberal?

People ask me "What do you propose we do with all the radioactive waste? Where should the spent fuel rods be kept? Do you agree to have a radioactive materials storage site next door to your house?" And my answer is "I don't know what to do with the radioactive waste, and I don't know where to put the spent fuel rods, and no, I'm not particularly enamored of the idea of a Yucca Mountain-style facility next door to my house, but I think I'd prefer figuring out the answers to those problems to the idea of diverting all my disposable income to oil company executives and Middle Eastern warlords while at the same time filling the atmosphere with nitric acid and carbon dioxide which may, in the long, prove to be a lot more dangerous to the planet than a bunch of blue-glowing fuel rods in a storage pond somewhere."

Ha! Controversy!