What about an energy policy?

Is this really true? I can think of two, Rancho Seco and Diablo Canyon. I thought we had got rid of most of them. Anybody live within sight of one?

I live in the Bay Area where I suppose it is more likely to see one, but yesterday when I left my house I found myself following a car with a sticker that proclaimed that it was running on vegetable oil. It seemed to go just fine.

I've been seeing more propane and hybrid vehicles locally, particularly propane buses.

Bush's energy policy has been to deny global warming as a fact.

Admittedly when I was able to buy a new car a number of years ago, I went for a 2.5 liter engine as opposed to a 2.2 litre one figuring that the conservatives would define the larger displacement engine as still puny compared to what they drive.

What is the displacement in these hulks that eclipse the horizon? 750 cubic inches?

padmasambava I know lots of people driving diesels on vegetable oil (biodiesel). It makes them feel good but it is simply burning food, is a negative btu source (like hydrogen), and no solution at all. I live in California too, and I guess most nukes are on the east coast.

btw the dodge V10 has 488 cubic inches.

As of August of 2004, there were 103 operational nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Source:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf41.htm

There is also a nice .pdf map link there of where they are located (Be warned, this .pdf is BIG so dialup users beware)

jomacc
Indian Point just North of NY City is active

People piss and moan about the lack of "alternative enregy" sources out there but as soon as someone comes up with something the same people are out there screaming that it shouldn't be done.

We have a proposal here in MA to put windmills out in the ocean off of the south shore of Cape Cod as a wind farm and it would produce enough electricity to make Cape Cod self-reliant (electrically) and they'd still be able to sell some excess capacity off on the wholesale market.

But it's being foungt tooth and nail by environmental groups - mainly on three fronts; The "propeller" could possibly end up killing a few birds that might fly into them; that people who live on the outer islands would be able to see these things (the plan was to install them some 7 miles from the nearest coast) and that some boaters may wish to traverse the area of the wind farm and one of them might not be paying attention and may run into one of the windmills.

All of these seem like acceptable risks for the chance to move a few hundred thousand homes onto a 100% clean power source but it seems that the activists will win the day on this one. They've already had it tied up in the courts for 3 years now.

If you can't get a wind from built the odds of getting more nuclear plants built is somewhere between slim and none.

As I see it, the only practical long-term solution is to develop fusion power, and then use the electricity generated for the electrolysis of water. The hydrogen would then be used as fuel.

If the U.S. has an energy policy, it's to suck the oil producing countries dry. We had better get our heads out of our collective asses on this one pretty quick. We had our first wake up call in the 70s, and we've been eating our seed corn since. The next wake up call will not be pretty.

I think, all these discussions can be very helpful and will finally lead to the development of some new energy sources.

However, this should have been done some 30, 40 years ago - Jim said it correctly, I think.

i believe it will probably take a combination of approaches to get us off of the oil and coal. most likely, there will be no "gosh this is great and oh, so clean" global energy in any of our lifetimes.

i hate to say it, because i grew up on it and love it, but the ohio river is pretty damn big and keeps on going. a dam, placed smartly could produce an awful lot of electricity for the region. maybe even more so the mississippi (did i spell that right??).

a few windmills is pretty negligible. a lot of 'em might do something. what about all of that open space out in montana and the dakotas? lotsa wind without "the perfect storm" to beat the crap out of 'em. and not too many people around to care about seeing them. by the time there is, we should have come up with a much safer plan for some kind of fusion energy.

get used to it folks. we are living in transitional times. we either work it out or we go the way of the dodo.

Energy policy, what energy policy? If they could harness the hot air coming out of congress and the administrations past and present we could tell OPEC to get lost. Unfortunately, for any action other than idle talk to occur we must reach a state of crisis. IMO that state was reached the minute we became energy dependent upon OPEC. In addition were it not a need for oil would the US be involved in the Middle East? I think not. It seems to me that it would be a lot less expensive to develop sources of alternate energy, even if they were more costly than the use of oil than to fight wars to protect our supply.

ENERGY POLICY
we all seem to be rather unhappy about the increased cost of energy. from what i understand (which is really not very much), prices for oil derived energy adjusted for inflation are now lower than they were about twenty years ago. of course, we are likely using more energy than twenty years ago, so our total consumption cost has gone up. most - if not all - of the new energy sources seem to have a higher price tag than conventional energy, and not too many are willing to pay a higher price. as long as prices for petroleum and its products are not going to go through the roof, we will no doubt continue to rely on it. if we compare north-american energy prices with those in the rest of the world they seem to be pretty low - of course, we don't like to hear that. as we say in canada : "if i wanted to live in europe and pay their high prices, i'd move there; but i live in canada and the GOVERNMENT should bring in legislation to bring the price down ". (of course, we don't like the government to interfere in anything that profits us, right ?).
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as far us energy supplies are concerned, alternate sources of energy seem to have a higher price tag; don't like that either. so in the meantime, we'll continue to rely on the conventional energy sources, mainly oil and natural gas. perhaps we should not despair, because there seem to be quite a number of ways to increase our energy supply (many environmentalists argue, of course, that we should be consuming LESS energy, rather than increasing the supply). i'll mention two increased supply sources that i've come across recently. (1) a canadian energy company announced recently that they have developed an improved refinery method that should get an additional "25%" of finished product out of each barrel of oil. they expect that the first refitted refinery will be ready in less than two years to start the new production process.(2) enormous amounts of "frozen" natural gas are deposited in the mackenzie river delta in canada (and in other places around the world). however, the cost of extraction is at this time too high to make it profitable when compared to the cost of currently available natural gas. i would think that as time goes by, the cost of developing these new deposits will probably come down to make it competitive.
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personally, i have a problem with the increased reliance on nuclear power. i hope that science can find a way to eliminate - or at least greatly reduce - the "residue" resulting from the use of nuclear power. storing the spent fuel cells underground for (i don't know how many generations), does not seem a very prudent way of managing the "waste".hbg ... MACKENZIE DELTA GAS DEPOSITS