O'Reilly interviews Obama, part 4

[dragonrider]

Maybe I am crazy though?:jointsmile:

you are definitely crazy:thumbsup:, but i have no idea if he switched his stance on this or not. Just felt like sharing...

^^:S2:
Yeah I guess they are probably 2 seperate issues.

Well, yeah, they are separate issues! One is beyond dispute, and the other is open to debate!

I used to be solidly for nuclear power when I was younger because I was fascinated with the enigineering.

Then I went through a time of opposing it, because the waste is extremetly difficult to deal with, and it remains deadly for far longer than human civilization has existed so far. Also, the potential for a truely disasterous accident that kills hundreds of thousands of people and poisons massive areas of land for thousands of years is very real.

If they could find a good way to deal with the waste and make the plants safe from accident, sabotage, terrorism, and war, I would be in favor of nuclear again. It is definitely a highly efficient form of power generation. And the waste is in a solid form that can be processed or stored, not like coal, gas, or oil that produce exhaust that goes into the atmosphere.

We've got enough nuclear fuel for something like 250 years worrth of electricity generation for the whole planet. And if you allow for breeder reactors, which also produce plutonium fuel as a by-product of using uranium fuel, we have enough for something like 10,000 years. (The problem with that is mostly political, because it basically makes fuel for nuclear bombs.) If we could solve these environmental, safety and political problems, I would be behind it 100%.

(Becasue I believe in a future in space, I'd like to save a large part of our nuclear fuel for nuclear rockets. We are definitely going to need the nuclear rockets when we start colonizing the solar system. Hope I didn't just blow all my credibility with that! It's in parenthesis, so it can't be held aginst me!)

The REAL non-polluting future for renewable energy on earth is solar, wind, geothermal and biomass. I was glad Obama stuck by that in this interview, and I am also glad that he is talking about devoting some MONEY to it. We've been talking about it forever, but not putting any resources into it. It's time we committed. There are endless geo-political, environmental, economic, and national security reasons to get off of oil. I'm glad to see Obama is committed to that.