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Title: The McCain Plan – Homer Simpson Without The Donut
Source:
rense.com
URL Source: http://www.rense.com/general82/simp.htm
Published: Aug 7, 2008
Author: By Greg Palast
Post Date: 2008-08-07 14:21:08 by TwentyTwelve
Keywords: McCain, McStupid, Nuclear plants
Views: 165
Comments: 9
The McCain Plan – Homer Simpson Without The Donut By Greg Palast 8-7-8 I'm guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain's comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain's gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson's. On Tuesday, the presumptive Republican candidate descended into the colon of a nuke to declare we need to build 45 new nuclear plants - that this is the way out of our energy crisis. Nuclear power, declared the senator, is a "safe, efficient [and] inexpensive" alternative to oil. Really? We can argue all day about whether nuclear plants are safe (they aren't period). But there can be no argument whatsoever that these giant radioactive tea-kettles are breathtakingly expensive. Nuclear plants are cheap until you actually try to build one. Not one of the last 49 nuclear plants cost less than $2 billion apiece. I'm looking down the road at the remainders of the Shoreham nuclear plant which took nearly 20 years to build at a cost of $8 billion or close to $7,000 per customer it was supposed to supply. When I say "supposed to," it was closed for safety reasons after operating just one single day. We're told that the new generation of plants will be different. Just like an alcoholic child-beater, the nuclear plant builders promise us that, "This time it will be different." Sure. And McCain believes them. I don't. Maybe that's because I headed the government racketeering investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant's builders. Stone & Webster Engineering and its partner paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the civil racketeering claim over the evidence we found of fraud and perjury. Now Stone & Webster will cash in big-time under Plan McCain. The other big builder which will hit the jackpot under the McCain scheme is KBR, the one-time subsidiary of Halliburton, whose best known project is the rebuilding of Iraq. (Halliburton dumped KBR last year. Can't blame them.) KBR has built many nukes not one within a mile of its promised cost. But that doesn't bother McCain. So who is McCain getting his energy advice from? I'm looking at a photo of the perplexed senator inside the control room, looking like Homer without a donut, getting a lecture on the wonders of nuclear energy from a power company CEO, one Tony Early. Early is the former President of LILCO, the very corporation the Feds and State of New York charged with civil racketeering. (We did not name Early as a co-conspirator. When the government got him on the witness stand, it was clear the guy was too clueless to recognize he was in the midst of a billion-dollar swindle. McCain's got quite some team.) Now, you Obamaniacs might not want to read this next paragraph: While McCain is pushing nuclear power, a Senator from Illinois who shall remain nameless (skinny, just gave up smokes), was already embracing radiation as the solution to pollution. This Senator voted for George Bush's energy bill, a law which contained massive giveaways to nuclear energy, legislation which diss'es and dismisses conservation. Indeed, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate has been derided as the "Senator from Commonwealth Edison," the Chicago company which is the nation's largest operator of nuclear plants and whose executives were the money backbone to his early presidential campaign. So, we've got both candidates hawking the nuclear snake oil. But there is one difference between them. A big big BIG difference. McCain's ready to spend a hundred billion dollars on nuclear power, no questions asked. But Barack Obama puts a crucial condition on his approval for building new nukes: an affordable method of disposing the new plants' radioactive waste. That's not small stuff. While The New York Times reporters following McCain repeated his line about "inexpensive" nuclear power without question, a buried wire story on the same day noted that the Energy Department is putting the unfunded bill for disposing nuclear plant waste at $96.2 billion nearly a billion dollars per plant operating today. And no one even knows exactly how to do it, or where. Obama has the audacity to ask about the nuclear waste's cost. "Can we deal with the expense?" he said on Meet the Press. McCain's plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations. So there you have our election in a nutshell. We have two candidates who rise above their parties - only to agree on a ludicrous pro-nukes energy plan. But at least Senator Obama, when confronted with an economic question, doesn't have to take off his shoes to add up the facts. *********** Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. 
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#1. To: TwentyTwelve (#0)
Good job, Greg.
No, Nuclear Power Plant in the United States has ever turned a profit once you add up all the expenses in building, operating, and disposing of the waste (with a radioactive half-life ranging from hundreds of thousands to Billions of years).
"The difference between an honorable man and a moral man is that an honorable man regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he is in no danger of being caught." ~ H. L. Mencken
How cheap would it be if they removed the lawsuits and sent the lawyers home. We do have much more advanced energy production methods locked up by the secret government. I am not talking about windmills and solar panels!! I once convinced a research scientist at Stanford's Hoover Institute that our secret government has anti-gravity. He believed me. He asked to be included in their Tesla anti-gravity research. He said what they sent him was childish dreams and not the real deal. Anti-gravity could be used to turn a turbine and produce cheap electricity.
The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
How do France and Japan do it then?
"A leader, for a change." - Jimmy Carter, 1976 campaign slogan. Sound familiar? Here it comes again!
Still too many negatives to make it worthwhile. You still have the waste problem and it has to be kept well away from any human habitation well into the indefinite THOUSANDS OF YEARS. As it accumulates over time you have a larger and larger pile of radioactive waste to dispose of. Certainly Tesla's research is well worth exploring. One of his last projects was "Zero Point Energy" and broadcast Power. I suspect, but cannot prove, that he was successful, and that is one of the reasons his research has been bottled up and kept buried under a shroud of extreme secrecy. His final research papers have NEVER been released and they were scooped up by the From time to time some brilliant inventor has come up with an alternative and there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support that contention. However, invariably one of two things has occurred: 1. The invention was bought up and shelved under covenants of nondisclosure. 2. The inventor was murdered and the invention stolen and locked up. My own father developed something, and to this day I do not know exactly what it was, but the prototype was stolen in a break-in to his garage and he NEVER again would talk about it or attempt to replicate it. I know about it only because of one brief exchange with my mother, now dead, many years ago. The utility grid IS part of the CONTROL grid.
"The difference between an honorable man and a moral man is that an honorable man regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he is in no danger of being caught." ~ H. L. Mencken
Who says they are? The long term costs are still the same: Construction Operation Decommissioning Storage of the waste for thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. It is a false economy. The French and Japanese Nuclear Plants are government run and subsidized. The true costs are difficult to track and are not a matter of public record. Both countries have a shortage of natural resources that allow for alternatives (from publicly available technologies). They both pay higher electric bills (particularly once you include the subsidies and long term costs for waste storage).
"The difference between an honorable man and a moral man is that an honorable man regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he is in no danger of being caught." ~ H. L. Mencken
Fair enough, but, theoretically, you can set up a breeder reactor and re-use the fuel almost in perpetuity. You end up with lead when you're done in ten thousand years which can then be used for fishing weights in a lagoon on a terraformed Mars.
"A leader, for a change." - Jimmy Carter, 1976 campaign slogan. Sound familiar? Here it comes again!
Personally, I think the technology already exists, buried in secrecy, to obviate the need. Hints of it pop out every now and then, as well as the well documented fact that Tesla's research was "disappeared". The real energy problem we have is the people in charge do not want us to be too independent and able to tell them to f*ck off. Look at what happened to Pons and Fleischman - they had to flee the country to continue their research in Europe because of death threats and because no one here would fund the research. Had it not made such a big splash in the news they would likely have been quietly bought off or snuffed. As it was multiple Universities put together intentionally faulty (that has been proven if you take the time to search out the data) experiments (M.I.T./C.I.A. comes to mind) to show that their reaction did not work. The people currently in control do not want a cheap portable alternative to Petroleum and the Power Grid. Both are control and monopoly money making operations, and they'll kill anyone who threatens their control. The Publisher and Editor of the main magazine devoted to developing alternative technologies, "Infinite Energy Magazine", "had an accident". The people in control intend to remain in control and will murder anyone at any time that, however remotely, threatens their control mechanisms. They already know alternatives exist and it is a matter of preventing them from getting to market. Nuclear Power is a red herring, not because it is not possible, as it is simply more of the same centralized control power technology. It should now be possible to ramp up Solar panels for the home and convert to a local 12 volt system, but no one is willing to invest the several hundred million it would take to ramp up production of solar panels to the level of scale which would make them cheap and abundant. As well the technology exists for anyone with a small creek to build their own miniature hydroelectric power plant - but there are "Zoning Restrictions" etc., which make it difficult to impossible, and as well the technology is not mass produced to make it cheap.
"The difference between an honorable man and a moral man is that an honorable man regrets a discreditable act even when it has worked and he is in no danger of being caught." ~ H. L. Mencken
It is difficult and life-threatening for anyone to come out with new energy technology.
#2. To: TwentyTwelve (#0)
McCain's plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.
#3. To: Original_Intent, wentyTwelve (#2)
#4. To: Original_Intent (#2)
#5. To: Horse (#3)
(Edited)
How cheap would it be if they removed the lawsuits and sent the lawyers home.
FBI Gestapo and classified very soon after his death. This of course would close down the electric utilities almost overnight. The Plutocracy which owns those utilities will kill to prevent that.
#6. To: mirage (#4)
(Edited)
How do France and Japan do it then?
#7. To: Original_Intent (#6)
#8. To: mirage, TwentyTwelve, Wudidiz, all (#7)
#9. To: Original_Intent, christine (#8)
The people in control intend to remain in control and will murder anyone at any time that, however remotely, threatens their control mechanisms. They already know alternatives exist and it is a matter of preventing them from getting to market.
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