John McCain Takes a Look at the Chevy Volt

This just shows how clueless McCain is. We need to transform our transportation system by moving away from the automobile to high-speed rail, rapid transit and cycling. Obama gets this, McCain doesn't. McCain doesn't even mention rail, cycling or public transit in his policies in spite of the fact that people are driving less and clamouring for rail and public transit.

With the price of everything going up and wages falling, people can't afford to pay thousands of dollars extra for expensive hybrids and electric cars. The rest of the world is way ahead of us in high-speed rail, rapid transit and cycling. Congestion is growing, our highways and bridges are crumbling. It is time to realize the age of the automobile is over and stop wasting money on highways, bridges and hybrid and electric cars.

I can't wait for this thing to come out.
Don't knock the nukes because there will be too much NIMBY and NOPE opposition to building them... there will more likely be a new oil refinery before there are new nuke plants going up. Too much opposition. Where do people think our energy will come from ?? The Sun? Hey, ... wait a minute!

vsk

Why nuclear power is 'too bad'? Nuclear power still is the cleanest source of electricity so far, cleaner than solar, wind or hydroelectric.

Richard:

Mind citing a single source where Obama states that we need to move away from cars to cycling? I have a feeling your projecting your own beliefs onto him.

Yeah, I agree with the previous comment. You can't just put in a snippet of "that shit sucks" without justifying it. Journalism 101. Very unprofessional.

The only quibble I have with the McCain nuclear plan is that republicans have a tendency of doing whatever their lobbyists want. I'm not sure it's so much better just because these lobbyists are from a carbon-neutral industry.

How is the nuclear power the cleanest source of energy? What about nuclear waste and the storage issues is clean?

bkydcmpr

Ever heard of nuclear waste??? Or heavy water?

What is with the multiple pro-nuke posts? Books have been written about why it is not viable and you want this article about the Chevy Volt to go into that topic as well?

There will be no major infrastructure change by 2010 as far as our transportation goes. While waiting, a plug in hybrid electric can do a world of good.

It will take at least a generation or more for people to change their transportation habits. All electric and hybrid electric will be needed to bridge the gap.

thespyofcharles:
What is unprofessional is writing a post that does not indicate which post it is referring to, and then writing something that does not make much sense.

What can John McCain do to fire up his backers?

a. Go on a national tour singing "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran."

b. Crib opening of "Ellen"—begin campaign events by dancing down the aisle.

c. Drop the N-bomb. At this point, what could it hurt?

http://www.236.com/news/2008/07/18/john_mccains_old_white_angry_a_7804.php

well... david... mk.....

when i wrote that comment, the latest comment was the other pro nuclear one. i'm not sure why comments always show up out of chronological order like that. maybe theres some way to respond to comments that i'm not aware of, which puts your comment below the comment you're responding to.

and books can be written about anything. that doesn't prove your point at all.

and although i believe that solar and wind are better than nuclear in many ways, it's important to acknowledge the benefits of nuclear. namely, no CO2. the radioactive waste, especially the waste released from the few accidents there have been, is way way less than the radiation released from coal fired plants. the way i see it, solar/wind are better than nuclear, nuclear is better than coal. i'm not entirely convinced that solar and wind will pick up fast enough t o displace coal, so in the meantime, nuclear is a better option.

this post is already too long... and if we get into the pros/cons and ways to take care of the nuclear waste problem, then the post will get way too long... point is, solar and wind are greater than nuclear, nuclear is greater than coal.

Remember what Obama drove before he was a candidate - he is caught up in the car culture also.

As far as I see it - there are extreme "treehuggers" that want little to no cars. That is a nice goal but realistically, the US is set up to have cars. We could have less and drive less but it is too late to have the whole country be like Manhattan (and not sustainable either).

Now - you could do a lot with motorcyles/scooters and you can also do a lot with Electric vehicles. I personally think Nuclear and PHEV is a great way to go. Build all the wind and solar you can but you can't keep up. If you massively subsidize - you will also drive up costs - look at what the German program has done to solar costs.

Charles,

No C02??? Are you daft? Do a little reading before spewing such absurdities.

How about the downside of current nuke tech...you know...large tract of land that is uninhabitable for centuries...like that one in Ukraine? You think even a 1% chance (stupidly conservative number on my part) of that happening is acceptable?

Third gen, fine. But they don't exist yet.

Get a friggin clue before you allow those dopey fingers to start a typn'.

Hey, isn't this a Chevrolet Volt article?
I am wondering what the advances are for a safer nuclear reactor fuel.

The right wing zingers were joking that McCain was going to subsidize Volts for all who wanted one. A nationalized driving system.

I hope the car is a success.

vsk

I wrote one of the pro-nuke posts. I guess everyone knows nuke is more efficient and generates less carbon dioxide in the full life cycle. Speaking of radiation, nuclear fuel materials (U or PU) are from the nature, the waste won't make it worse.

I'm sorry Willy, but you're comment is just inaccurate and misleading.

First, very little of the land around Chernobyl is uninhabitable. In most of the originally affected area, radiation levels have returned to background levels.

Second, the Chernobyl reactor was a unique case. The reactor design is one that would have been outdated in 1960. It was built both to generate power and to produce plutonium for the Russian government, and because of this was known to be unstable when power output was decreased below a certain level. The person in charge of the plant was a bureaucrat who had little knowledge of radiation or of how the plant worked. The plant decided to conduct a poorly thought out test in which they altered power output after deactivating the safety controls. So, when the coolant supply was interrupted, there were no fail-safes. The most important thing to remember, though, was that there was NO containment building. No structure for containment at all. This is an accident that actually couldn't happen here in the US.

Third, any nuclear plant that gave off as much radiation as a coal plant would be shut down. Most of the radioactive waste from coal plants is concentrated in the fly ash, much of which is used to make concrete for buildings that we live and work in. By contrast, all the radioactive material from nuclear plants is locked away.

Fourth, much of nuclear waste from power plants is short-lived, lasting only a few years or decades. Some of the longer-lived components do need to be locked up for a few hundred years. But the really long-lived components, the ones that last thousands of years, are the ones that can still be used for power production. The rest of the nuclear world, which reprocesses spent fuel so it can be used again, doesn't have large amounts of long-lived waste.

Fifth, there is no basis for claims that the world doesn't have enough uranium to power a fleet of power plants. Proven uranium reserves are sufficient to fuel thousands of reactors for centuries, even if they are once-through reactors and we don't reprocess spent fuel.

Over time, wind, solar, wave, tidal, and geothermal energy will display other forms of power generation because they are the cleanest, and they will be the cheapest.But right now, nuclear is cleaner than any fossil fuel and less expensive than renewables. In fact, nuclear power is usually the cheapest on the grid, over the life of the plant. Like it or not, the argument facing power companies isn't "Should we build coal or renewables?" We simply don't have the manufacturing capacity in place to build renewable power fast enough evenjust to displace expected demand growth. And we don't yet have the capability to store large amounts of energy, which is a prerequisite for making renewables the primary energy source. We will at some point, hopefully very soon, but we don't yet.

In Japan, it takes on average 3-4 years for a nuclear plant plant to be operational, from the time it is first proposed. I mention this because the US could ramp up nuclear power to displace a significant fraction of our fossil fuel use in much less than a decade, if we choose to. And we'd then have a cheaper, more reliable, less polluting energy supply. And as this interim generation of plants ages and gets decommissioned, we will be in position to replace them with renewables.

"There's much to dislike about the Senator"
Bias? What bias?

Anthony makes a good point for Nuclear. Although many people cringe at the thought of nuclear waste and imagine a world filled with it someday, keep in mind that per megawatt basis, very little waste is generated since only a small quantity of uranium is required to start off the chain reaction within a reactor.

In regards to the waste, the nuclear industry is one of the few (if not only) industry that cares for its waste entirely and processes it. Other industries tend to just spew their waste out into the air, or water, with minuscule treatment at best.

The Canadian CANDU reactor for example, does not require enriched uranium (although it does require heavy water), can burn spent uranium and other fuels like plutonium, and has an excellent safety record.

And Willy, i can't tell if your "third gen fine. but they don't exist yet." was referring to third generation reactors. If you were, then you are horribly wrong because they are around and have been for quite a while, and i would be happy to inform you that the third "plus" generation reactors are out too such as AECL's ACR reactor (granted, it has yet to be fully built commercially).

Tony, I love your rationalizations for why Chernobyl is somehow a unique and never to happen again occurrence. Good luck with that.

I have read up on the current status of the surrounding area of Chernobyl. Background rads are in no way the most dangerous, and are always the ones that drop the quickest. Read up a bit on the other types of rad contamination that is very long lived and builds up in the food chain. Or, don't read up, and go buy some nice cheap land. Good luck with that too.

As everyone knows what you just wrote is patently absurd, let's move on. How about all those cooling ponds in all those "modern" plants, huh? Ever read up on how shaky that whole system is, and what happens if the ability to constantly circulate cool water past the old rods ceases? No, I suppose you have not read up on that. Maybe do so, and then the taste of foot in your mouth might subside a wee bit.

As I said before, and you convientently ignored, third gen is fine.

How about a bit more citing of sources and a bit less of making fun of people. The former continues the discussion, the latter is not as productive.

Chernobyl and the 3 mile island accident were something of a set of unique circumstances. a lot of things had to go wrong, a lot of human error, for things to happen the way they did. Anthony didn't say that a nuclear power plant accident would never happen again. He did say that given the designs and regulations of nuclear power plants in the US, it shouldn't be physically possible for something like Chernobyl to happen.

Of course, to say it is impossible would be incorrect. If enough people make enough stupid mistakes, if enough failsafes are removed, or if enough equipment (which is regularly inspected and made without sparing any expense) fails, then you can concede that a nuclear accident might happen. Even then, the containment structures will prevent the kind of damage that Chernobyl caused.

And the cooling pools aren't inherently necessitated by nuclear power. Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel has been illegal and then simply not utilized. Other countries that have made the investment have successful reprocessing operations that enable them to recycle their spent fuel. They don't have the problems we have.

In any case, no one is saying that nuclear is better than solar and wind. If those sources can take up the mantle of providing us with all our needs, baseload power and all, then by all means they should. Al Gore seems to think they can, and personally, I think every effort should be made to have all of our power to come from those sources. But until renewables make up a significant enough portion of our power, the relevant dilemma is choosing nuclear or coal. And while this is the case, we should make a point of looking at the facts and using them to choose the best case scenario. If you have opinions, they need to be justified, and not simply thrown about as if words were cheap. Otherwise you'd be no better than someone like bill o'reilly... hahaha