Where is the substance in McCain ?? What in his actions or history makes one think He can make good decisions
and lead this country.

And by the way, fission power doesn’t qualify as very clean if you live near a uranium mine. An increasing proportion of the world’s people will not have uranium mined anywhere in their vicinity, which means that unless you can turn up a uranium deposit in Antarctica, you may find your 100 reactors without fuel.

First, uranium is neither the only nor the most abundant suitable fission fuel. Thorium is, and India is exploring reactors suitable for thorium.

Second, our once-through fuel policy is both wasteful and dangerous. It uses only about two percent of the energy available from fission while a closed breeder cycle can extract about 99 percent. Not only do you get 50 times less waste, but because you have extracted most of the available energy, the remaining radionuclides are either short-lived (half life of a few decades) or low-level. Within a few hundred years, the radioactivity falls to that of the original, natural uranium ore. This is far safer than the once-through fuel.

We decided against reprocessing to make it hard for rogue states (and terrorists–consider Thunderball) to get their hands on plutonium. But there are reprocessing methods that never achieve a full separation of plutonium, making the process resistant to theft (though not to terrorism for the purpose of destructive effect).

The downside is that the best place to do the reprocessing is onsite with the plant. Plants need to be near sources of cooling water, and placing them too far from the customers they serve means losing large amounts of power in transmission. Just about nobody wants a reprocessing plant at Indian Point, Oyster Creek, or Diablo Canyon. Rivers and coasts are where the population concentrates.

Decisions, decisions ….

Talk about a false dilemma: support the inequitable crony conservatism endemic to the current Republican Party, with all it’s faults and the failings I have enumerated, because Stalinism doesn’t work. Well, the United States worked pretty well under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and even Johnson. Senator Obama intends to make a few modest reforms, something that hardly makes him a communist.

Unlike you, I believe that Americans have room for achievement, the achievement of a government that does not loot future generations, an economy that does not run up unsustainable debt, and a robust society not made brittle by a division between the haves and the have-nots.

By the way, classifying disagreement with your position as a psychiatric symptom indicates, as anyone old enough to remember Leonid Brezhnev knows, a bankrupt and dead end political philosophy.

I prepared a response to your comment. My hope is that you will see my position as reasoned, even if you see it as incorrect. I judge the response to be a bit long for these comments. If you email me, I will send it to you. I use gcotharn, and yahoo, and if you will figure out the rest, we can defeat the spambots.

Gotta love that if you like Obama.

Right, B.L., reasons as to why Obama might be one of the worst Major Party candidates in U.S. history – thus in comparison also to McCain – are good news if you like Obama. Good thinking – it’s oso “Progressive”.

There might just be some plausible reasons to vote for John McCain, but you hardly hear them here, where its all Obama, all the time.

Gotta love that if you like Obama.

I would say, John, that you should probably get hold of some antidepressants instead. That, and also review realistically the well-established failures of Communism, especially in comparison to the undeniable success of American Democratic Capitalism.

A mental state characterized by disasterizing, coupled with dreams of Utopia indicates to me a condition of severe personal dis-ease.

Or, as Curtis Mayfield suggested:

Why don’t you check out your mind
Been with you all the time

hey john… why then didnt they let us build 100 nuclear reactors. cleanest energy possible…

First, “they” might not let you build 100 reactors because 100 reactors will probably set you back about 20% of a year’s GDP for the United States. And by the way, fission power doesn’t qualify as very clean if you live near a uranium mine. An increasing proportion of the world’s people will not have uranium mined anywhere in their vicinity, which means that unless you can turn up a uranium deposit in Antarctica, you may find your 100 reactors without fuel.

And you haven’t connected this with anything I have written.

note that they just anounced a 30 year period of cooling by better data than hansens models.

I claim no status as a climate scientist; I have no idea which “they” you refer to, and you haven’t remotely connected climate science to anything I have said.

Whatever happens to the Earth’s climate, millions of boomers will start to retire in 2010. The Chinese will continue hold an iron grip on close to a trillion in US currency reserves. Unless something changes, the US trade deficit will continue to pile up debt. Your existing infrastructure will continue to require huge amounts of fossil fuels, and the conventionally recoverable stocks of oil will continue to dwindle.

hows this for an answer thats better than yours..

Irrelevant, since I never claimed to have an “answer”, and the only one of your comment to offer anything like a rebuttal (never mind a solution) to the problems I have pointed out dealt with Iraq, and the actual signs coming out of Iraq, and Western Asia as a whole, seem to me to warrant a lot less optimism than you have shown. You’ve said nothing about the eight year government deficit, the twenty-eight year trade deficit, the crumbling infrastructure, the enormous burden for long term care the Iraq war has created, the fragility of a deeply unequal economy, or the increased competition for fixed (and declining) stocks of oil.

hows your feeling on carytid… its often how i feel… thoughi love heinliens reference to it in one of his books.

thanks gcotharn!!

hey john… why then didnt they let us build 100 nuclear reactors. cleanest energy possible…
[and we are a space faring peoples, so we dont need to store it on land for thousands of years, by end of century, if socilsits dont have their way, we will have garbage skows to the sun. though the earth will be pretty cold, have you counted the sun spots lately?]

things are looking good in iraq…ergo no more news coverage… in fact news coverage is down by an extreme amount…

note that they just anounced a 30 year period of cooling by better data than hansens models. (note that hanson used to push global cooling to a new ice age, and the culprit was oil and coal… then when things kept getting hotter, he postulates that coal and oil are to blame for that. meanwhile, the suns variations and our orbital path and wobble shows the source to be solar. by the way, last time we had no sunspots like now, it got real bad cold… and sunspots are a solid predictor of weather…(so says REAL climitologists, which hansen is not!)

hows this for an answer thats better than yours..

you open up the coasts to drilling, that way we can get oil that china and cuba are taking since they can drill closer than we can to our own lands.

then we open up the very small area (not even one square kilometer but musch smaller) to drill for oil in anwr…

and the biggest would be to open up the bakken oil fields in montana and get that out. its more oil than the saudis biggest fields.

we remove the laws restricting and keeping new more efficient refineries…

we build 100 more nuclear reactors… with excess heat used to make fuels from biological materials and the primary energy to stop us from burning coal.

we help the chinese so that they can stop building new coal plants that burn sulfer coal

we put out an X prize for new battery technology. hydrogen will not work well. unless nuclear is making the hydrogen, then its not cost efficient. with great battery technology we can plug in at night, and get a weeks worth of charge while we sleep. we can charge while parked…

allow more wealthy people to fund space science by taking tourist trips. this will build an industry that eventually will be able to do a lot of things that are not so good here. (like noxious chemicals in manufacturing, and energy from the sun, and so on).

oh… and dont forget to follow kenyas top economists advice and leave the africans alone and let them build an economy (their farmers cant compete with free food, nor can factories make clothing that can compete with free charity).

we finish the war effort.. and we close the shipment door for weapons through serbia, and the sea, and iran, to the middle east and africa so that they arent constantly destabalized so as to inflate the price of russias natural resources for the siloviki.

we start cleaning house. we stop most of the state socialism. the largess to large companies… and so forth.

without socialism, there is no way to transfer huge amounts of tas dollars to freinds, family and poltical causes the peopel dont support.

in the cronie days you could maybe add money to a highway project… today your freind can start a not for profit, and the socialist can dump 20 million into it and so on.. heck its possible to give a single cause more than a billion dollars this way. heck obama has worked for a tax that would give 840 billion away to freinds in high places.

none of it possible without soicalism.

so… i think most of that above is better…

but then again, i want everyone to live well, and i dont care if i get power.