NUCLEAR COMEBACK IN CONGRESS


After environmental legislation and Greenie litigation has almost destroyed the nuclear power option, it is going to take an effort and money to reverse the damage and give access to unlimited clean power

More than 26 years after a near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the Senate is considering an energy bill that includes financial incentives for construction of nuclear plants. It's the latest sign of the industry's quiet rehabilitation.

Sen. Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican who is the chief architect of the bill being debated, has long been an advocate of nuclear energy. And President Bush will repeat his call for boosting nuclear power when he visits the Calvert Cliffs plant in Lusby, Md., this week. They have some unexpected company:

* Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said that although he has been "totally opposed to nuclear power" in the past, he's now willing to give it a second look. "You're going to see a move towards nuclear power," he predicted. "If it's done right, it will protect the environment."

* Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., includes incentives for nuclear power in a measure he plans to offer to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. McCain argues that nuclear power can help solve global warming. "I am a green and I entreat my friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy," he said in a Senate speech

* Another recent convert: Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat whose home state of New Jersey gets nearly 52% of its electricity from nuclear power. "Nuclear issues are being forced on us by the realities of life," he said. "We are being blackmailed by those who produce fossil fuels that we import, and more traditional domestic energy production poses risks to the environment."

27 years with no new licenses

No nuclear power plant has been licensed in the USA since 1978, the year before the Three Mile Island accident in central Pennsylvania. But interest is growing. The reasons: rising prices for oil and natural gas, concerns that fossil fuel emissions are harming the climate, and an increasing desire to make the nation less dependent on energy supplies from the Middle East. "It's now dawning on people that if you're talking about producing cleaner energy that will really fulfill needs of large populations, nuclear stands alone," Domenici said in an interview this week.

No one died at Three Mile Island. But the failure of mechanical systems, which caused a partial meltdown of the reactor core and some release of radioactivity, was "a public relations disaster for our industry," said Steve Kerekes of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Even so, nuclear power never went away. There are 103 nuclear plants operating in 31 states, which Kerekes said generate 20% of the nation's electricity. Now, three companies have told the Energy Department that they plan to file for nuclear power plant licenses.

The Senate energy bill and a version passed by the House contain incentives to encourage investment in nuclear power. Both bills renew federally backed insurance for the nuclear industry, which Bush also supports. Under the Senate bill, new nuclear plants could qualify for federally backed loan guarantees for "innovative technologies." The Senate energy bill also provides tax credits for companies that develop new nuclear reactors. Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan watchdog group, called the credits one of "the worst" of the measure's "giveaways to energy special interests" and estimated that it could cost taxpayers "billions of dollars in tax breaks."

Potentially costly for taxpayers

Some environmentalists, including Stewart Brand, editor of The Last Whole Earth Catalogue, are endorsing nuclear power as a way to reduce global warming. But according to Dave Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs for the Sierra Club, "by and large the environmental community is united in thinking that nuclear power is a bad idea that causes more problems than it solves."

Nuclear reactors do not produce greenhouse gases, but they do create radioactive waste. There will be 52,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel in U.S. storage by the end of this year, according to Dave McIntyre of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Safety and security are key issues, especially amid concerns of possible terrorism.

Hamilton said nuclear power is potentially costly for taxpayers because the government will have to pay for the cost of waste storage and the bulk of any cleanup after a reactor accident. But he says the industry has done a good job of cultivating lawmakers. "They have done an exceptional job of lobbying."

The Nuclear Energy Institute's political action committee has contributed $76,376 to candidates so far this year; 95% of the contributions have gone to Republicans, The industry has also donated to Senate Democrats, such as Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana

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ANOTHER DECEITFUL SCARE HEADLINE

On June 13, USA Today declared that "The debate's over: Globe is Warming." That's another headline you can ignore. The world has been warming ever since the last Ice Age, but it is not rapidly warming in ways that threaten our existence, nor warming in a way that requires the industrialized nations to drastically cut back on their use of energy to avoid the many scenarios of catastrophe the Greens have been peddling since the 1980's.

Global warming is a classic scare campaign initiated by the Greens after a previous effort in the 1970s to influence public policy by declaring a coming Ice Age failed to generate any response. What we are seeing now is yet another worldwide coordinated campaign by the Greens to rescue the global warming theory from the junk heap to which it should be consigned. In early June, the National Resources Defense Council, one of the large Green organizations, declared that, "Global warming is fast becoming the number one environmental problem of our time." It has organized an Internet campaign led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Sen. John McCain, and other so-called environmental leaders to drum up the fears of people who know little of the real science of the Earth in order to force the U.S. to implement the United Nations Kyoto protocol on "climate control." Anyone who thinks humans have any control over the Earth's climate is willfully ignoring the evidence that we have none.

The NRDC declared, "The world's leading scientists now agree that global warming is real and is happening right now. According to their forecasts, extreme changes in climate could produce a future in which erratic and chaotic weather, melting ice caps and rising sea levels usher in an era of drought, crop failure, famine, flood and mass extinctions." Scary, eh? One huge volcanic eruption could this. As to the weather, it is the very definition of chaos and has been for billions of years.

The good news is that leading climatologists and meteorologists are actively debunking this nonsense. One of them, Dr. F. Fred Singer, president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, is in the forefront. He debunks a June 7 statement issued by several national academies of sciences just before Britain's Tony Blair arrived for talks with President Bush, saying, "The Statement simply regurgitates the contentious conclusions of the (U.N.) International Panel on Climate Change report of 2001, which has been disputed by credible scientists. The so-called scientific consensus is pure fiction."

Among the data he cites is the fact that, "Since 1940, there has been a 35-year-long cooling trend and not much warming in the past quarter-century, according to global data from weather satellites." Moreover, "an extrapolation of the satellite data gives at most a fraction of a degree rise for the 2lst century," adding that, "The IPCC further claims that the 20th century was the warmest in the past 100 years, but this myth is based on a seriously flawed publication. The IPCC also claims that sea levels will rise by up to nearly a meter by 2100; but every indication is that they will continue to rise inexorably and much less, as they have for nearly 20,000 years since the peak of the last Ice Age."

Bear in mind that the IPCC is a creation of the United Nations and we have all seen how corrupt that institution has become, failing to fulfill its mandate for a more peaceful world while seeking to become a world government that would destroy the sovereignty of the United States and all other nations.

Other scientists have joined Dr. Singer to dispute the global warming claims. Paul Knappenberger of the University of Virginia, says of the claims made by the science academies that, "What is missing is the scientific assessment of the potential threat. Without a threat assessment, a simple scientific finding on its own doesn't warrant any change of action, no matter how scientifically groundbreaking it might be." What passes for a threat assessment is simply the claims being made. Knappenberger noted, "The fact of the matter is that there does exist a growing body of scientific evidence that the climate changes in the coming decades will be modest and proceed at a rate that will lie somewhere near the low end of the IPCC projected temperature range."

Here's what you must keep in mind: the IPCC claims are based on what virtually every scientist knows to be seriously flawed computer models for its projections. In short, we are being asked to believe what computer engineers are telling us, not what credible climatologists and meteorologists are telling us. There isn't a computer model for the world's weather that can reliably predict the future by more than a week at best. This is why tracking the routes of hurricanes proves so difficult. This is why blizzards often turn out to be better or worse than initial projections.

Iain Murray, another scientist, laid into the statement of the national academies for having committed the sin of advocacy. "Climate alarmists in the scientific community now face a long retreat, while the victory of President Bush's position on the issue seems assured. Even the hopes of European intervention are dashed." The U.S. Senate unanimously rejected signing the Kyoto protocol many years ago. "Rational nations will not take action if the costs of the action outweigh the benefits," said Murray of the protocol's demand for energy caps on emissions while exempting nations like China and India, each with more than a billion people.

Meanwhile, in Congress we have people like Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), the ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, seeking to introduce legislation that would put "caps" on emissions of greenhouse gases and implementing what is essentially the Kyoto protocol that the Senate rejected long ago. The U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that a cap-and-trade program such as Bingaman proposes would cost $331 billion in lost GDP between 2010 and 2025. Other senators like McCain and Lieberman have similar strategies. Caps are idiotic and, in my view, treasonous.

There is no scientific consensus. There is only the manipulation of public opinion and the effort to influence public policy. There is no rapid global warming and no way that any limits on energy use could have any effect on it if it did exist. Global warming is a classic scare campaign and we may well be witnessing its last desperate gasps as more and more scientists step forward to debunk it.

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THE LATEST MEDIA BEATUP

A short extract: Full debunking here

"The front page of the June 8th, 2005 New York Times carried a piece by science writer Andrew Revkin that revealed edits to a government global warming reports that were made by White House Council on Environmental Quality chief of staff and former American Petroleum Institute employee Philip Cooney. An example of one such change that had Revkin concerned was "Mr. Cooney amplified the sense of uncertainty by adding the word 'extremely' to this sentence: 'The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.'"

Such trivialities led science and policy expert Roger Pielke Jr., to write on his weblog that the Revkin piece amounted to "Manufactured Controversy". For instance, Pielke Jr. points out that one of the documents cited by Revkin as being altered by Cooney, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program's Strategic Plan, later went on to be thoroughly reviewed and approved by the National Research Council. The NRC then endorsed its scientific content and recommend that it be implemented "with urgency." Apparently Cooney's edits weren't found to be too objectionable by the NRC.

Not satisfied to let the Times have the monopoly on manufacturing controversy, 10 days later, on June 17th, 2005, the Washington Post ran a front page article by staff writer Juliet Eilperin who claimed to have uncovered further evidence that the U. S. government was editing "scientific or policy documents to accord with its position that mandatory carbon dioxide cuts are unnecessary." This time the guilty parties were U. S. negotiators who were involved in drafting some climate change verbiage to be discussed"

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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