Liberals Warming to the Idea of More Nuclear Power
Today I noted a strong pro-nuclear blog article in an unlikely place and I call it to your attention. For those who do not know, dailykos is a highly read left leaning blog. The blog article itself (link) is a good presentation of the facts regarding nuclear power and stands as a strong refutation of the irrational opposition to it in this country.   The writer does an excellent job of contrasting the potential release of nuclear waste into the environment as opposed to the immediate dumping of coal waste into the environment.Â
Also, please read the comments. They shows that nuclear is now (finally) being considered as an alternative to coal by some people on the left.
 It's an excellent read. All nukes should be delighted to see this development in that part of our society.
Offline
Altho the specifics differ country by country, the use of nuclear power is not essentially a left/right issue.
Globally, the penetration of the technology is related to how centrally planned and managed the national economy functions.
In general, the more centralized and less liberalized (in the market, not the political sense) the economy operates, the greater the penetration.
I was surprised that the author of that blog entry did not do his or her homework. Of the (many) errors in the analysis, I think the most pointless was the mocking tone about the potential casualty numbers of an Indian point accident. He repeatedly implied that the Lyman just pulled the numbers out of his behind. If the writer simply took 2 minutes to check, he would see that Lyman used the industry standard Sandia Natl Labs MACCS2 code, http://www-rsicc.ornl.gov/codes/ccc/ccc6/ccc-652.html and specified rainfall over NYC as the weather condition during the run. The 44K immediate deaths and 500K committed long-term deaths is the direct output of the program. This computer output strongly underestimates actual potential damage, because it assumes massive successful instant evacuation.
The lack of careful work is a good reason why I avoid Kos and most other blogs. They turn important, complex issues into the text versions of grandstanding sound-bites. That blog entry was an ignorant and particulary silly re-hash of unsupportable and erroneous nonsense from beginning to end.
