Yes. I'm Voting for McCain

According to Joseph Romm in the Huffington Post:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) made a stunning statement on the radio show of climate change denier Glenn Beck this week:

... the French are able to generate 80% of their electricity with nuclear power. There's no reason why America shouldn't.

In response, a leftist beclowns himself

In the same article, there's the following response:

Why can't we? Wrong question, Senator. The right question is -- Why would we? Let's do the math.

………

Bottom Line: To satisfy McCain's odd desire to be like the French and get 80% of our electricity from nuclear power in the coming decades would require building more than 700 (GW-sized) nuclear power plants by midcentury -- more than one a month.

It's ba-ack!

A few years ago, I said:

One of commonest leftist tactics during the Reagan era (I haven't seen it much lately) was to talk about the cost of a defense program per decade to produce more horrifying sums. Sometimes they would use similar tactics in dicussing the “cost” of tax cuts or the number of lives that would allegedly be saved by a proposed environmental regulation.

It's possible to make an all-nuclear power system sound unaffordable by putting together the cost over several decades instead of by the year. (Apparently, oil isn't paid for over decades.) You can make it sound less affordable in the U.S. than in France by pointing out that the U.S. will need more nukes … and ignore the fact that the large size of the American economy makes that large number affordable.

Question: Does Joseph Romm know he's making an innumerate argument or is he really an idiot?

Meanwhile, let them fight. Nukes may have won several states for the Republicans in 1980 and may do so again. It will be really hard to talk about a “Republican War on Science” in the middle of a no-nukes rally.

For example, one of the comments on the Huffington Post article read:

This is the most dangerous and reckless decision ever.

Scientists have no idea at present how dangerous this technology is - their instruments can not measure the more subtle radiations that these nuclear stations emit. It is this radiation that pollutes the environment and sickens the population. The direction to go is to disable all nuclear fission stations and develop and invest in new forms of energy such as cold fusion energy - a lot safer, creates no polluting emissions and is cheap to produce. The world trend is to reduce dependence on nuclear energy, the US should lead by example.

Subtle radiations? You mean pixy dust? You mean the rays that made an invisble pink unicorn appear on my front lawn? You mean rays that interact with cancer cells or autistic brains but magically pass by Geiger counters? By the way, how do you know your favorite forms of energy production don't emit similarly undetectable rays?