Bush, McCain, and nuclear energy

I awoke with this all put together in my mind, like Coleridge did with "Kubla Kahn".

“I believe there’s only one environmental conflict, and that’s between short-term and long-term thinking. In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it’s unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.”

-Mollie Beattie, first woman to head the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

It is so clear why nuclear energy will NEVER be a solution for energy production, and why John McCain was NOT the better choice for President this year -- or anyone holding the same view, in ANY year.

Here are the keys:

Producing energy from nuclear fission or fusion, produces nuclear byproducts that are dangerously radioactive for thousands of years. This means they must be guarded to prevent accidental injury and prevent malicious theft for use in terrorism. Just the cost of doing so for a hundred years (to say nothing of doing so for thousands of years) far exceeds the value of the energy produced. Then add the huge costs of designing, licensing, operating, and protecting nuclear facilities, and the energy produced is not a net gain, in any sense. Nuclear energy is simply a hole into which a people will continue to throw outrageous amounts of money in exchange for no net benefit, and condemn their descendants to the same fate, without their consent.

A man who cannot even pronounce "nuCLEar" should never have been entrusted with decisions about nuclear ANYthing. Thankfully, George W. Bush's term is almost ended. To have elected a man as his successor one who stated that, as President of this nation, he would have opened the floodgates to development of nuclear power, would have been the most foolish act this nation could have taken.