URL: [sorry this link is no longer available]
Website: [sorry this link is no longer available]
(Visited 67 times, 11 visits today)
Keep up with our News!
Loading...Loading...URL: [sorry this link is no longer available]
Loading...
The US Federal government for nearly two decades now has provided a 30% tax credit applicable to any tax liability for the investment in solar and wind energy. On top of this net-metering policies ensure that renewable generators, despite their unreliable nature, are privy to have their electricity generation purchased by mandate and at the retail rather than wholesale rate. On top of this a littany of state and municipal rebate and tariff programs exist as well as renewable portfolio standards which mandate adoption of renewables and drive utilities to provide land and transmission concessions for renewable projects. All told the subsidies given to wind and solar on a per kWh basis are an order of magnitude higher than any conventional energy source.
So frankly the entire premise of the article above is an avoidance of real-world fact.
We have written several articles on the vast difference between renewable energy and fossil fuel subsidies on the federal, state and local levels (and internationally). Fossil fuels get at least five times the support of renewables.
Great article!
But I would like to add a few salient details of the history not mentioned in it.
1) The cost of the Manhattan Project was far more than 10 Billion dollars. Despite that fact, we-the-people were NEVER given a credit on privatized for profit nuclear power. We paid for the development, we ensured the power plants from radiation accidents and we paid to make utility investors an ARTIFICIAL profit. This is an obscenity.
2) Nuclear power plants were TOTALLY unnecessary fro nuclear medicine because a cyclotron can make all the short lived isotopes needed for tracers in nuclear medicine. Eisenhower (and General Groves) KNEW that. The UN speech was hype.
3)Most of our bombs DID NOT come from commercial nuclear reactors because, by their very design, they had too much “product” of a very unstable isotope of Plutonium that must be kept to a very low percentage in order for the material to be considered “bomb grade” plutonium. You have to shut the plant down a few weeks after a start up and harvest the product at exactly the right time. That is not feasible (cold shut downs and starts every few weeks for a commercial nuclear power plant. SPECIALIZED nuclear reactors were built specifically to make the bomb grade plutonium. We-the-people paid for them too! BUT, we were ALLOWED to believe nuclear power plants were a huge risk to underdeveloped countries and a resource to be cherished and protected because of the “Bomb product potential”. It was a LIE. We-the-people actually preserved MORE profit for the investors by allowing the U.S. Government to provide MORE “protection” in the form of SECRECY in the private sector of nuclear power. A club was created. we-the-people paid for it including funding university nuclear physics departments and keeping the cloak of secrecy under the guise of “national security” (NOT! – it was REALLY nuclear club JOB SECURITY).
4)With this backing, all sorts of pollution and mendacity about accidents and leaks and cancer clusters and epidemiological studies proving children near power plants had higher cancer rates were keep from we-the-people. The profits just keep coming in for the investors and rampant externalized costs (that would make the coal mining industry blush!) from uranium mining cancers to sloppy nuclear waste “disposal” in the oceans, etc. were ALL kept out of the public view.
In other words, the “national security” monicker was used to defraud the American public of billions of dollars for a technology that has NEVER been profitable when all the environment AND energy costs of extraction to disposal are ACTUALLY accounted for.
Full details at the link below:
http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/nuke-puke/no-we-never-needed-lwr-nuclear-power-plants-to-make-nuclear-weapons/