Shuttle + SPS art

> We also need solutions today

We have them. They’re called “nukes.” Any politician who stands in the way of new nuclear powerplants is committing an act of treason. Just that simple.

Didn;t get very far in reading your link: “Breaking: Toshiba tells San Antonio its new twin $13 billion nukes will cost $4 billion more! The city balks. This looks like a job for clean energy.”

Sorry, but nuclear *is* clean energy. When sucha fundamental error is made in the *title* of an article, there is little hope for accuracy in the rest of the article.

> The free market seems to have difficulty in providing nuclear power.

Thanks to excessive burdens place on it by decades of lies and hysterics by the anti-nuclear movement. But elsewhere in the world, including other nations and the US Navy, nuclear reactors seem to be easy to make. But no matter how cheap some structure you’re tryign to build might be, when you’re constantly having mortars lobbed at you by luddiets and lawyers, your prices will go up. When the luddites and lawyers win and cause you to stop work for *decades,* restartign the process will be somewhat chaotic and likely to be more expensive than expected. When the luddites and lawyers have been so successful that many universites that once offered nuclear engineering programs, such as Iowa State, my alma mater, you’ll find that there are far fewer of the trained experts you need to run the business.

>I don’t think we should use nuclear plants to just replace fossil fuel plants and keep our consumption where it is (or allow it to rise.)

Agreed. We should use nukes to *supplement* fossil fuels, and encourage energy usage to increase. Efficiency is a good thing, but it’s a limited resource of diminishing returns. If you want humanity to prosper (and consequently all other species), ever more kilowatt-hours per person is required.

If you want humanity to suffer, and to drag down the rest of the environment with us, then by all means restrict energy. That way, people will resort to burning trash to stay warm. And when they run out of trash, they’ll chop down the trees to stay warm. I’ve seen it. That’s what happened in California during the government-driven Grayouts. That was by far the filthiest air I’ve ever seen.

And people struggling to make do with less rarely make grand adventures out into space… which is the only way to save the future.

> if the US were to pass a strong bill lowering carbon emissions significantly…. I would not object

Well, sure. It’s not difficult to see why non-Americans support the US cutting its own economic throat.

> And decreased energy use doesn’t have to mean suffering.

And collectivism doesn’t have to mean suffereing either… but history has shown that the concepts do seem to go together.

>Just eliminating obvious waste, more efficient transportation, smaller houses, less cars, etc.

And how does one achieve this? The current US administration wants to engineer this future by sowing the maximum misery, forcing people to give up comfortable houses for dinky apartments, large cars for smaller, slightly more fuel efficient cars, etc.

A less evil and more forward-thinking (dare I say… progressive) approach would be to instead greatly increase energy generation systems (wind and solar for those few locatiosn where it makes sense; a few thousand additional nuclear reactors, including breeder reactors), and start a concerted effort towards the production of a synthetic gasoline replacement, such as… wait for it… “gasoline.”

With a few extra dozen terawatts of electrical power, we could make a major dent in the need for imported oil by converting garbage and sewage and lawyers into crude oil via thermal depolymerization. Doing so would allow the current infrastructure to remain in place in perpetuity while reducing the “carbon footprint” of such “carbon criminals” as jet-setting Al Gore. This would certainly buy us the time needed to build major space-based solar power systems.