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I’m a Democrat and I will always be one, but in my seventy-two year lifetime the worst President I’ve encountered is Jimmy Carter. He entered the Presidency with the goal of promoting nuclear power. As the President he used his influence to create an oil shortage emergency, which did in fact create a demand for nuclear power stations but coincidentally it created at the same time a demand for smaller cars. The demand for smaller cars gave rise to the Japanese auto dynasty and stoked the appetite for the globalized offshore goods, which has all but destroyed our manufacturing ability.

As for the nuclear age that President Carter started I was employed in it for a large part of my working years. The nuclear bubble burst within ten years as people realized that the promise of safe disposal of plutonium failed to materialize and people with the thought of all the nuclear power stations each collecting enough of the poison to eradicate the planet was growing out of control. The later part of my work in the industry was dismantling for scrap something like four power stations in the making, which went for 8 billion dollars each at the time.

I see the same thing about to happen. The president/oil industry collusion has created an oil emergency to promote drilling in more of our offshore waters and to building more nuclear power plants.

I am not against nuclear power plants. We have enough poison in our nuclear arsenal to eradicate the world without worrying about nuclear power plants. I am not against offshore drilling. What I hate is being forced into it by dumb people.

Henry –
You think Jimmy Carter was PRO-nuclear? He may have served on a sub, but he did nuclear no favors. He created the plutonium problem! We used to recycle plutonium into fuel for new reactors, but now we just put it in the storage pools. We could reduce nuclear waste drastically with the use of reprocessing, but Carter banned it.

You make plutonium sound like an insanely deadly poison, when in reality caffeine (from coffee) is similar in lethality. Plutonium is mostly dangerous on inhalation, after all, and you can stop that most of the radiation with a sheet of contact paper. The danger to the globe from plutonium is that people will fire the missiles and nuke cities, not give people plutonium poisoning.

As for your work in the nuclear industry, you seem to have a appalling lack of knowledge on nuclear waste. The key problems are the moderate half-life fission products like Cs-137 or Sr-90. Those are water soluble and highly radioactive, unlike plutonium. The higher transuranic elements also are rather more hazardous than plutonium.