agendas

With the world waiting to see if any of the four nuclear reactors go into meltdown phase, the right is using this as a reason to stress the importance and safety of nuclear energy. Over at Right Wing News, we see this:

Obviously, as one cruises around the Liberal-o-sphere, this means that all nuclear power is bad and that is should all be stopped, and, instead, we can go with wind and solar for all our power. If they left those methods get beyond the planning/implementation stages.

We hear constantly that nuclear energy is the “safest”. In most senses that is true, but one accident at a plant can have greater catastrophic repercussions than accidents at 1,000 coal or oil plants.

Another thing, which  I mentioned yesterday, is the very high safety standards Japan enforces. Those standards are probably a big reason why we didn’t see a meltdown occur when the quake hit yesterday. Here in the United States, where one of the biggest agendas of the Republican Party is doing away with government regulation, you got to wonder if we would have seen the same outcome? I can hear the arguments now; “let’s build a reactor in Ohio. They only get minor earthquakes, so we don’t have to be as safe”. Of course that is until a big one hits.

Then in the same post at Right Wing News, we get to this example of pure rubbish:

Of course, I wonder how those methods would have stood up with an earthquake and tsunami knocking them down, breaking the wind turbines and solar panels, covering them with water, and flooding the storage batteries.