Is Rice Being Thrown Under The Bus?

[Troll Patrol]

why don't any of the cost statistics for nuclear power include the cost of waste maintenance and disposal

It's not that nuclear power doesn't have problems. It's that nuclear has far lesser problems than coal.

That includes waste disposal. Nuclear waste is dangerous, but there's so much *less* of it than, for example, the nasty poisonous mercury-laden sludge from the stack scrubbers of a coal power plant, that it is much less of a problem per unit of power.

Likewise, the problems of lakes killed off by acid rain, areas rendered uninhabitable by open pit coal mines, or by sinkholes from abandoned mines, or by underground fires in coal seams, have also been socialized and turned over to the citizenry.

maybe it sorta kinda makes me a con, but I absolutely believe in that "let the market decide" thing that they always talk about, but don't seem to understand.
nuclear, with its 500,000 year waste problem
coal with its own clean up and extraction problems
oil with its wars and pollution problems of its own
all have to be evaluated based on all the benefits and problems of each

when you start looking at the whole picture, solar and wind start to look a lot more competative

but then, what con is going to actually use the "market" to make decisions when it is so much more fun to talk about their utopian market when they want to rationalize some new privatization of the commons profit scheme

UMM? So why does the market keep choosing coal, oil and nuclear over wind and solar?

duh - because the taxpayer subsidizes the socialized interests of coal, oil and nuclear over wind and solar
As I said, because only the coal, gas and nuclear profits are considered in the comparison. If the real cost (free market) were considered (waste) as part of the picture (rather than dumped onto the taxpayer), renewables would be more likely to compete
If thoughtful intelligence were used, we would likely decide (as citizens responsible for leaving a thriving country for our children) that moving the current subsidies 1) from oil would lessen our dependence on foreign sources and keep us out of these ongoing oil wars, 2) from coal would improve the quality of our environment and 3) from nuclear would decrease the taxpayer burden to store these wastes for 500,000 years.
Seems simple enough to me, either put renewable on equal competitive ground, or accept there use as an improvement and give them a competitive advantage
Either way, it makes no sense to subsidize these never ending wars, pollution and big business

Umm? Solyndra, etc;? I didn't realize they were coal and oil companies.

[billy.pilgrim]

one example

and no where near the subsidy to exon and ge and murray

[rstrong]

Rail importation to the US is not an absolute, that's just TransCanada's claim. So many lies, like how many jobs would be created, have already been exposed.

This one isn't a lie. They're already doing it. It's only a matter of how much more oil gets shipped that way.

I know it's happening some, I was just questioning whether it was a certainty that the entirety of KXL proposed pipeline production would come here anyhow by rail. Sorry if I was unclear.

It looks like the Keystone XL pipeline is dead.

The Keystone XL pipeline will not be built. And while the environmentalist arguments against the pipeline had a significant impact in delaying construction of Keystone XL, the primary reason it will not be built is because it really isn’t needed any longer.

Rail it is, at least for Bakken formation oil.

Shipments of petroleum and petroleum products by rail in the United States are up 33.6% year-over-year through last week. A total of nearly 607,000 carloads of crude and refined products have been shipped by rail in the U.S. this year, and more rail terminals are being constructed every day to accommodate booming production from the Bakken.

The Lac-Mégantic derailment was carrying Bakken formation crude oil.

For Alberta oil, it's starting to look like the pipeline to the west coast (and onward to Asia) will happen. Along with the conversion of existing pipelines heading to refineries in the east.

I'm wondering if that "Alberta Oil" includes the Alaska oil going through another TransCanada Corp. pipeline to Alberta, courtesy of Agent Palin.