You know, this is perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen, and I read The Corner:
You get that? Barack Obama’s a namby-pamby liberal idiot because he wants nuclear power to be “safe.” It’s totally safe! Which is why the GOP is planning on storing spent fuel in their backyards, next to the garden tools.
This isn’t just stupid, it’s the reductio ad absurdum of the Republican argument this year. “The liberals say we should think about things beyond the most facile level. Stupid liberals! Let’s go blow something up!” It’s reckless, and it’s embarrassing. If the Democrats were trying to argue using similarly fact-free terms, I swear, I’d vote GOP — because they’d be showing themselves to be fundamentally unserious about the very notion of governance. Which is exactly what the Republicans have shown themselves to be.
For the record, Obama’s totally right: nuclear power should be looked into, but it also should only be adopted if it can be done safely, with a certain knowledge of where we’re putting the spent fuel rods. And we need to answer a lot of questions — are we going to open up Yucca Mountain? Does John McCain really want the nuclear-fuel trains running through Phoenix? And is he going to say we should do this right now, with Nevada a swing state? What are our proposed standards for safety? Are we going to talk to our friends the French about their experience with nuclear? Or are we going to dismiss them because they’re France?
And these are just questions that I came up with off the top of my head. I would expect a man who wants to be president to think about this stuff more than I have over the past ten minutes. But that’s not how the GOP works anymore. And that’s why they’re going to lose next Tuesday.
The big problem with Yucca mountain is that the US is so backlogged for nuclear waste storage that it is already booked up with existing waste. You have to realize that most of the waste isn’t Simpsons-esque green goo, but actually left-over radioactive soil from clean-ups of earlier piss-poor storage attempts during the mad rush of the cold war.
Either way, Yucca mountain needs to be made several times over, with or without new plants.
I hope that you’re right about the result of the election. You’re certainly right about your observations.
This is simply astoundingly stupid.
The cheers at ‘blah blah blah’ are the cheers of a group of people who, “don’t need to listen to what no big smart smarty-pants has to say! Him talk a lot! HAW!”
—Myca
But doesn’t this just show what a communist Obama is? Don’t we all remember how obsessed the Soviet Union was with nuclear safety?
It seems to me more like the cheers of a group of people who don’t give a shit about anybody other than themselves. They don’t care about you or me or their children or their grandchildren as long as they get theirs. Tax cuts (which 99% of those folks won’t get) and the benefits of tax cuts (which 96% of those folks won’t get) are more important than the wellbeing of their own children and grandchildren. It’s the selfishness inherent in the modern Republican party (and, as far as I can tell, in the vast majority of the modern conservative movement).
You know . . . if you’re not safe and if your environment is toast with radioactive waste for the next 10,000 years , there’s really very little point in having a fancy nuclear reactor so you can run your AC all night. It’s interesting that McCain got a big cheer from the republicans when he ridiculed Obama for concern about the environment.
As Jake said, it’s selfishness taken to the extreme . . . as if my perogative to run my AC is more important than millennia of environmental risk to future humans and other creatures we share this planet with.
I heard this on the radio today and I laughed out loud. I say anyone who is in favor of nuclear power has to volunteer to host it within the fallout zone of their main residence. Maybe they can host a small amount of waste on their property, too.
Yes, it’s CRAZY to be so concerned with safety.
If the Democrats were trying to argue using similarly fact-free terms, I swear, I’d vote GOP — because they’d be showing themselves to be fundamentally unserious about the very notion of governance.
I am voting for an incumbent Republican congressman precisely because of that. I heard the Democrat–whom I had been planning to vote for, based on the info on her web site–in a radio interview yesterday, and realized that I do not want her anywhere near government. The Republican hasn’t been great during his time in office, but at least he’s not out there ranting about how unemployed people who don’t have health insurance should just get a job, because nobody has a right to health care, and how if it weren’t for all those pesky regulations, American businesses wouldn’t be forced to outsource to other countries that don’t care about health and safety. Seriously.