Obama's naive view of WOMD scary

Too bad I don't have as much time as I used to to write about politics, because there certainly is a lot to write about. Like today I just saw on TV that Obama said to Europeans that he wants to end the world of nuclear weapons.

To me that's about as naive as thinking that more gun laws will rid the world of guns. Imagine for a second Obama succeeded at making it nearly impossible for people like you and me to get guns. Say he succeeded in making guns illegal.

Well, guess what. Good guys like you and me may not be able to buy a gun, but bad guys will still be able to get a hold of illegal ones. And, assume even further that there were no guns in the world. People who want to kill will simply resort to knives.

So say Obama succeeds in getting rid of all European and U.S. nuclear weapons. You'd still have people who hate the U.S. -- like Iran and terrorists -- who will do everything in their power to find or create nukes of their own.

Oh, wait! Liberals think the reason people hate us is because of all the power we flaunt. Well, Obama, guess what? Nations hated us long before nukes were invented.

And, since the good guys have no nukes, that would give those bad guys a heck of a lot of power.

How the heck does Obama think the U.S. won the cold war anyway. It certainly wasn't by sending flowers to the U.S.S.R. No. It was by starting an arms race that a communist nation could not possibly win.

Likewise, by building up our war arsenal, no other sane leader would dare mess with the U.S.

Yet Obama wants to dumb down our military, and get rid of all nukes. Sure it sounds like a good idea on the surface. It might make some people feel good, "Yep, we got rid of all nukes."

But such naive thinking will not get rid of all the bad guys. Such naive thinking will do the world no justice. It's true: Obama's navie view of nuclear power is scary.

Claus Fuchs is the father of the nuclear arms race

In 1941 Claus Fuchs started providing secrets of the A-bomb that was being created by Robert J. Oppenheimer. In 1945 the A-bomb was not only invented, it was used by Truman in an attempt to end WWII -- it worked.

Oppenheimer and one of his helpers, Edward Teller, talked about making a super A-Bomb -- or the mother of all A-bombs -- the H-Bomb. This would be a bomb that would a nuclear fusion reaction the size of 100 A-bombs. It would also have the ability to destroy the earth as we know it.

And, obviously, it created that fear.

In 1945 the Soviets had no A-bombs, and they had absolutely no knowledge of how to build one. For that matter, the only country with this weapon and know-how was the U.S.

Yet, in 1949, the Soviet Union tested an a-bom with success. This made many in the FBI and CIA suspicious that there might be a double agent. Of course that agent turned out to be Fuchs. He, in turn, turned out to be the most disastrous spy in the history of civilization. It was because of Fuchs that we had the Cold War.

It was because of Fuchs that we had the arms race. And it was because of Fuchs that the war for peace was no longer an attempt to decrease arms, but to increase them.

Oppenheimer did not want to build the H-Bomb. While he was adviser to the president on nuclear policy, he advised Truman not to go through with it. He said he did not want any part of something that may end of destroying man kind as we know it.

Truman rejected Oppenheimers suggestion. Truman, wisely, believed if the U.S. did not develop the H-Bomb first and become efficient at using it before the Soviets, then the Soviets will have the upper hand. The U.S. cannot afford for that to happen.

So, he hired Teller to build the H-Bomb. Teller was more than eager. And he succeeded. And, shortly thereafter, the Soviets had an H-Bomb too. And it was in the early 50s that the soviets became the first to drop an H-bomb from a plan. Shortly thereafter the U.S. did the same.

In 1949 Fuchs was busted. In fact, he actually turned himself in to clear his conscience. But the damage was done. He, in turn, was the father of the nuclear race that we are still apart of today. Fuchs was the reason that we MUST stay ahead of the game in the arms race.

Lord knows had the Soviets had the upper hand, they would have destroyed the U.S. They tried in 1942, but thanks to a double agent who was on our side, that war was averted. And, like the Soviets, if the Iranians or the terrorists had the upper hand, the U.S. would be no more.

Here's the truth about nuclear waste: part 2

One of the things that worries me about nuclear is that what if global warming really is a hoax? What if it really is phony baloney, and we decide to go nuclear as a nation for our energy, and are left with all this nuclear radioactive waste that is expected to last a million years for nothing.

On a brighter side, however, scientists say that all the nuclear waste they ever expect to be leaked out of the Yucca Mountain, this would (as a worse case scenerio and a conservative estimate) amount to about "5,096 cubic feet. By volume, all this waste could fit into a studio apartment about twenty-five-feet with a ten-foot ceiling."

Thus, the amount of nuclear radioactive waste that would be considered a hazard over the next several thousand years amounts to a small fraction of a percent. The best scientists and statistitions have determined that the chance of radionuclinde in Storage at the Yucca Mountain storage facility leaking into thte nearby water table is 0.01%.

Where the Yucca Mountain sits is similar to a bowl, where there is almost no chance water will drain into nearby rivers is streams or lakes and "can't reach Las Vegas." And where the nuclear waste would be stored is naturally designed so there should be hardly any water runoff.

And, even if there was, the storage equipment (as I described in "Here's the truth about nuclear waste: part 1), is "insoluble and immobile." Likewise, it is impenitrable.

Consider it this way. In my side of the family, there are no people with spina bifida that I'm aware of. On my wife's side, there are a couple. Thus, my wife opted to take a prenatal test called "the maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) test, performed between the 16th and 18th weeks of pregnancy." That is according to Kidshealth.org.

Now, with my baby KK, who is now a health 5-year-old of whom has complete control of my life, my wife's AFP test came up high. Our doctor sent us to Grand Rapids to see a genealogist and ultrasonographer. The genealogist lady mapped out our entire family tree, and gave us the chances that we would have a child with spina bifida: 1 in 250.

Do you know what 1 in 250 amounts to? It amounts to a 0.4% chance that our baby will have this disease. Did I do the math right? Something like that. Whatever it is, the chances are less than 1%.

Yet we were both still stressed before we heard the results of the 3-D ultrasound.

The neat thing about going to Grand Rapids is that they do a 3-D ultrasound. If you are ever going to have a baby, that is one COOL thing to watch. For KK, they made a tape for us of the ultrasound that we still have. Man, you can see things that you can't on a normal ultrasound.

This time around, the ultrasonographer told us a new doctor that arrived refuses to allow them to tape the ultrasound, so all she could do is make pictures. Still, that was cool. We have a neat picture of our baby grabbing and sucking on (his or her) umbilical cord.

On a side note, since we already have a boy and a girl, with this most recent pregnancy, we decided to not find out whether our baby is a boy or a girl (A secret I think will be nearly impossible to keep considering my wife works in OB and she has her OB RN friends do ultrasounds on her on a regular basis).

During our most recent visit to Butterworth in Grand Rapids, the ultrasonographer said: "I know you guys told me not to tell you what this baby is, but I'm going to." I could not make out what was on the screen, but she was about to tell me. "This is the brain. And, considering your baby has a brain, I can tell you it is a girl."

My wife loved that line for some reason.

Anyway, we still do not know what our baby is. But I can tell you, it is either a boy or a girl.

Okay, I have gotten a bit off topic, but I think you see what my point is. She told us that by looking at this ultrasound, that our baby had all its fingers, had a normal sized brain, had a great heart and heartbeat, had all its bones including its toes, and measured exactly as my brilliant wife predicted. And the babies spine was perfectly normal.

The odds were 99.75% that this would be the result. Yet, we were stressed none-the-less. It was our baby. Just like Nevada is the baby of Nevada residents. They are stressed over a less than 0.99% chance that these nuclear waste buried in a mountain in their state will effect them.

And, even though the chances of this baby having spina bifida were a whopping 0.25% as was
KK, our ultrasonographer said this baby, according to this ultrasound, was perfectly normal.

So here we are, in discussing the future of energy in the United States, being all stressed out and pessimistic about less than 1% of nuclear waste, and less than a 1% chance that something deadly would happen as a result.

Again, According to Gweneth Craven's book, "The Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy," (of whom I also attribute the above quote) there has never been a single death reported in the United States as a result of nuclear waste, or nuclear energy in general. It has not ever happened.

So, here we are, in the U.S. "spending a trillion dollars, (with) most of the public indignation, many studies, and hundreds of thousands of man-hours over decades to shape a plan for dealing with the nuclear waste turn out to be centered on some seven hundred metric tons of material, or 5096 cubic feet."

To put this in perspective, Cravens quotes political scientist John Kelly: You wouldn't want to be carrying some of those long-lived radionuclides in your pocket, not even after a million years. So that fraction of one percent is still a reason for caution and for taking prudent safety measures."

She quotes one scientist as saying this estimate is "conservative" at best, and said, "People tend to think that if something bad possibly could happen it will happen. That means people don't actually understand what uncertainties and probabilities are. It gets down to how to deal with uncertainties: What is the most that could be reasonably expected? It's a question of appearance."

Again, that's a lot of HOOPLA over the contents of a New York apartment complex, and even that amount would be leaked over thousands of years and not in one sincle instance, and this is a conservative estimate.

But, it's something of concern to a lot of people in Nevada, and the country as a whole, and the reason we are having this intelligent debate.

To be continued...

Here's the truth about nuclear waste: part 1

I have been blogging here lately about green conservatism, and how we need to get away from the high polluting coal industry for our energy, and endorse the more environmentally friendly industry of nuclear power.

I discussed this with a friend of mine, and she brought my attention to one key point: What about all the nuclear waste? Isn't that just as bad if not worse than global warming. "I mean," she said, "I certainly wouldn't want that stuff in my back yard."

Well, I said, not according to many environmentalists who have historically been anti-nuclear and pro-global warming. They now contend that nuclear waste is far better than global warming.

They put it this way. Coal releases CO2 that we have no control of, and nuclear waste is in a box, and we can control exactly where we put it. And the plan right now by the U.S. government is to store these boxes of nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountains in Nevada.

That in mind, I set out to learn more about nuclear waste. And, coincidentally, I walked into the library, and set right on the top shelf of the new book section, was this book: "Power to Save the World: The Truth about Nuclear Energy," by Gwyneth Cravens.

It looked like the kind of book that might be over my head and interest level in technical jargon, but I picked it up and checked it out regardless. Perhaps, wrapped up somewhere among this 373 page book, lie the answer to our questions about nuclear waste.

One of the biggest things the anti-nuclear crowd protested against was not so much the idea of storing nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain, but the safety of getting it there. She wrote this:

"In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences indeed concluded after study that the risk from transport of nuclear waste was minimal. To date, no radiological related injuries or deaths have been reported as a result of nuclear waste transportation accidents, and no releases from accidents involving shipments of high-level nuclear waste have occurred."

In fact, she writes that this transport equipment is "rammed into concrete barriers, T-boned by speeding locomotives, dropped from high altitudes onto long steel spikes, plunged into churning rivers, submerged for extended periods, burned with jet fuel for ninety minutes, and otherwise roughly handled. They've held up. Infant car seats are much more loosely regulated... Even if a cask were somehow breached, the damage would probably be minimal."

For over 40 years, she writes, nuclear material has been shipped by trucks and trains, and there has not been one incident, while trucks carrying hazardous chemicals are involved in accidents from time to time causing fatalities and illnesses. They are not nearly put under the same scrutiny as the nuclear industry, even while the nuclear industry has been far safer.

While steel melts at 1,600 degrees, the uranium fuel's protective covering is tested at temperatures as high as 3,600 degrees. So even if a truck were to catch fire as a result of an accident, the material still will not leak.

And, she adds, since "Global position satellites" are continuously monitoring the nuclear waste shipments, it is nearly impossible for a terrorist organization to plan to use such a shipment as part of its plans. And even if they did manage to get to the spent fuel inside the containers, "they'd die from radiation poisoning before they could do anything with the stuff."

Once the material gets to the Yucca Mountain, she writes that you could simply dump the stuff on the ground, put up some warning signs to keep out, and the stuff would pose no problem for anyone.

The only difficulty would be with the future. She quotes scientist Rip Anderson:

"A tiny proportion of it would be dangerous for many thousands of years, so it has to be put away deep inside rock. But even if it were left out here in the desert, you and I would never get exposed. Nobody living in Las Vegas would ever get exposed. The risk is that future generations might ignore the warning markers. So the anxiety about disposal of nuclear waste is not about the immediate effects. It's about what happens after American society is gone."

And still, of all the waste from nuclear facilities, only a small fraction is hazardous enough to need to be stored long term in remote isolation, in an area such as the Yucca Mountain.

In fact, 90% of waste has such a low level of radioactivity it is handled without special equipment and is incinerated and taken to the dump just like household trash. This would include soil, concrete, paper towels, rags, tools, coveralls, etc.

Of the remaining 10%, only a small portion is deemed high level waste which would contain about 95% of all the radioactivity emitted from the nuclear facility.

Here is a neat fact to ponder: One nuclear fuel pellet weighing 0.0007 pounds can generate the same amount of electricity as 1,780 pounds of coal, or 149 gallons of oil, or 157 gallons of regular gas.

Despite all this, Nevada is polluted with CO2 released from coal and oil waste, while nuclear power plants would emit zero CO2. The biggest concern of Nevada's politicians and voters is not about coal and oil, but about how bad they do not want nuclear power plants, and do not want the government storing nuclear waste in the Yucca Mountain.

While there has been a big deal made about radiation leaking from the mountain, scientists estimate that the amount released per year would be equivalent to that of a chest x-ray or 15 millirem above natural background radiation.

So that's the biggest fear, and the main reason for all the nuclear delirium, while the average person is exposed to up to 8,000 millirem per year just by being around normal electrical equipment in their houses.

Despite that, " the United States will spend an estimated $60 billion to comply with a regulation about low-dose radiation exposure based on an unproven assumption. That's a lot of money that could be spent on more useful things, such as feeding the poor.

Here's another neat fact: "a coal fired plant releases more radiation than a nuclear plant and also emits deadly toxic waste that kills thousands of Americans a month, (yet) in its fifty-year history American nuclear power has not caused a single death."

Listen, in the world we live in, we need to have energy. The process of making energy produces waste. The debate right now, should we choose to accept it, is whether we continue on the road using fossil fuels and gamble that pollutants produced by this energy source does not cause global warming.

Yes, we could regulate industries to death in an attempt to prevent this global warming (whether it be a hoax or true), or we could resort to a more reliable alternative, and the best alternative available to us right now is nuclear power and deal with nuclear waste.

It is with this question in mind that I started writing my posts about green conservatism. And why I delved into the task of researching for the truth about nuclear waste, because as we know by now, what we read about in the media is not always the whole story.

And that's why I set myself on this mission to learn the truth about nuclear waste. So far in my journey, I have found that the nuclear waste option is far safer for our planet and humans than the emission of all that CO2.

Still, if I find information that states that coal energy is safer than nuclear power, I will report it here on this blog. So far what I have found has upheld my theory that much of what we know about nuclear waste is a fallacy.

To be continued...

The next great debate: Nuclear Power

Is there such a thing as global warming or is it just a hoax? Many (NOT ALL) conservatives will contend that it is just a hoax, and Many, (NOT ALL) liberals will contend that it is real; that man is the cause of global warming.

Plus we must realize that not just many democrats but some republicans too have bought into it, as have a plethora of Americans. So it is something that we should take seriously. Whether it's real or not only God knows.

As you guys know from my previous posts, and my header on this blog, I think people should base their political views on facts and common sense before emotion. And that is why I think it would be foolish to think that the global warming crowd is wrong. I think they have a legitimate concern, that we humans may well be destroying our own planet.

Look, my fellow conservatives, I'm not saying we are destroying the planet. What I'm saying is that we simply may be destroying the planet. What do we know? We are puny little people on a huge planet in a magnanimous universe.

To all those liberals who think I'm all of a sudden buying into the idea of global warming, calm down a bit. I'm not. I think it would be foolish to think that we humans could possibly destroy a planet that has withstood natural disasters far grander than anything we humans could create.

Yet I do not stand alone as a conservative who refuses to brush off the global warming crowd, and that is why I endorse Newt Gingrich's Green Conservatism, of which I will expound upon in a coming post.

Yet Gingrich is a strong proponent of nuclear power as a means of cleaning up the planet, something that, in my humble opinion, might bring both conservatives and liberals on the same side.

In my researching of this idea, I came across Warren Tucker, "The Global Warming Two-Step, at Spectator.org, (June 2, 2008) which was written by a conservative who believes in global warming.

He writes that liberal desires to reduce carbon emissions may be more important than their desire to prevent the building of nuclear power plants, with their nuclear waste and all. And this may be important, because nuclear power is the only way we know of that will allow us to reduce carbon emissions.

And, since conservatives have been long chanting how important nuclear power would be toward creating a more energy efficient America, nuclear power would also reduce CO2 emissions by as much as 75% per year -- a goal the global warming crowd could live with.

I also came across an article by Ramesh Ponnuru, "Senator empirical: Bob Corker takes on climate change," in National Review (May 19, 2008), where Ponnuru writes about conservative republican Bob Corker who believes in global warming, but is skeptical about the Lieberman-Warner bill.

What is the Lieberman-Warner Bill? In short, as worded by Ponnuru, the Lieberman-Warner bill is a bill the Senate is scheduled to debate this week, and is called the 'cap and trade' bill. "It would fight global warming by setting a limit on the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. That's the cap. Companies that got their emissions below their limit would be able to sell the excel emission rights to other companies. That's the trade. The theory is that the companies that could most cheaply reduce their emissions would have an incentive to do so. We would get the most emissions reduction possible for the smallest hit on the economy."

Corker has proposed amendments to this bill that would return money raised from these auctions to taxpayers. Likewise, he states he would "support other republicans as they make the case for relying more on nuclear power. If the amendments pass, he says, he will have improved the bill. If they do not pass, he will have educated people about its drawbacks."

According to Jack Spencer, "Nuclear Power Needed to Minimize Lieberman-Warner's Economic Impact," of AmericanHeritage.org, the Lieberman-Warner bill being argued before the Senate this week intends to create a goal for decreasing the amount of CO2 emissions, or cap targets. But, given the energy recourse's currently available, and government regulations, this target may be unattainable.

Whether this bill becomes law or not, this debate in the arena of ideas might offer positive results for both conservatives and liberals. If it becomes law, it opens up the door and creates an incentive for entrepreneurs to develop and purchase other sources of energy, such as windmill, solar and nuclear "faster than they otherwise would."

It this way, as Lieberman contends, "It's a market based approach."

If it doesn't become law, we still have the option of nuclear power on the table as another option for entrepreneurs and lawmakers alike to reduce carbon emissions. And there are better free market options available to encourage this and lower CO2 emissions than this bill, of which I will discuss in more detail in my next post.

Yet still, the debate might bring both sides closer to one key conclusion: the only reliable source of energy that we as humans currently know about that would allow the U.S. to reach the goals of the Lieberman-Warner bill would be nuclear power. Or, better yet, the only way we know of that would allow us to cut CO2 emissions is nuclear power.

Thus, while the global warming crowd, be they republicans or democrats, liberal or even conservative, want less CO2 in the environment (and, technically speaking, who wouldn't?), there are people who don't believe in global warming, and still some who do, who believe more regulations brought on by more regulations would be bad for the economy.

In fact, According to Spencer, "A recent Heritage Foundation analysis... estimates the costs to the U.S. economy (of the Lieberman-Warner bill) at between $1.8 trillion and $4.8 trillion by 2030.

Some republicans, including McCain (of whom Lieberman endorsed for president) support the bill because they claim it is a better alternative to the carbon tax that would raise gas prices. However, Ponnuru writes, the "cap and trade would raise the price of gasoline too, and quite significantly, as oil companies passed along the legislation's cost to consumers... Most economists, whether they favor cap and trade or not, see it as very similar to a carbon tax in its effect. The major difference is political."

And this is why I currently oppose this bill, and why I signed Newt Gingrich's petition, of which I encourage you to sign too if you haven't already.

However, the Lieberman-Warner bill should result in many educational debates to come. Yet one of the most important debates to result from this may be the one that has been put on hold since the 1970s, and that's the debate about nuclear power in the United States.

With nuclear power, every side gets something. The global warming crowd gets a replacement for one of the biggest polluters in coal, and the other side gets an option that might actually benefit the economy (Again, I'll go into more detail tomorrow).

That's why this humble blogger believes its not such a good idea to be all partisan and not consider the other side. It's important to negotiate and compromise and do something good for everyone, not just one partisan view.

Still, as my brilliant wife recently reminded me, what do we do with all the nuclear waste?

I suppose an even better question might be: what's the worse problem for mother earth, global warming or nuclear waste? That might be the next great question on the horizon, and the next great debate.