GOP goes nuclear in policy pitch (CNN)

[eppur_se_muova]

From CNN's Ed Hornick

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Sen. Lamar Alexander, chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, made a strong push Saturday for investment in a power source commonly used in France: nuclear energy.

“Now the debate in Congress is shifting to the size of your electric and gasoline bills and to climate change," the Tennessee Republican said in the weekly GOP address Saturday. "So guess who has one of the lowest electric rates in Western Europe and the second lowest carbon emissions in the entire European Union. It’s France."

Nuclear plants provide 80 percent of France's electricity, according to Alexander, who added that the country even sells "electricity to Germany, whose politicians built windmills and solar panels and promised not to build nuclear plants."

“So you’d think that if Democrats want to talk about energy and climate change and clean air, they’d put American-made nuclear power front and center. … We say find more American energy and use less … and one place to start is with 100 more nuclear plants," he said.

Watch the full address

Obama's FY 2009 budget, however, promotes nuclear energy development. According to the Department of Energy, the budget includes the licensing of new nuclear plants and additional research into the nuclear fuel cycle.
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more: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/25/gop-like-france-us-should-embrace-nuclear-energy/




:crazy: I am SO SICK of Repubs glorifying France! :crazy:

[Xipe Totec]

1. Yea, when did the freedom friers start falling in love with the French?

What a bunch of two faced hypocrites!

[glowing]

2. Its a huge business. Nuc plants are worth billions of dollars in taxpayer monies.

AND the companies want to pre-charge for future plants.. which they started doing in Florida and had many Floridians actually up in arms over their increased bills.

The reality is that once you add in the environmental costs of mining and building and monitoring, its not all that "clean" and its expensive. Unlike France, we don't socialize our energy. We pay for it to be built and a private company bilks us for usage.. all while a private company insures the safety requirements.. of course we all know how that goes.

[99th_Monkey]

3. Makes me wonder where France is dumping it's toxic radioactive waste. ~nt~

[Fledermaus]

7. There is not one permanent dump for radioactive waste on this planet, not one, anywhere.

Seriously, not one.

[angryfirelord]

4. The double irony here

is that:

a) It's France. Hardly anything right-wing about it.

b) Nuclear power isn't capable of surviving under a "free market". It requires heavy funding from the government and has strict regulatory requirements on its usage. Hmm, that sounds a bit "socialist" to me.


I'd say the best solution to our power demand and environmental issues is fusion. The Manhattan project ran about $20 million back in the 40s, so in today's dollars that would be around $240 million (according to some inflation calculators). That's still far cheaper compared to the bank bailouts and the war. If we invested that much R&D into fusion, we could potentially make it a reality for mass deployment and it would be far more efficient than any technology we have right now.

[wroberts189]

5. "GOP goes nuclear" ...they still think people are listening to them. nt

[struggle4progress]

6. Electricity tariffs in France

... Option Tempo ...

There are three colours, blue (jours bleus), white (jours blancs) and red (jours rouges) which represent low rate, medium rate and high rate ... The rules for tempo are

* The tempo year starts on 1st September.
* The tempo day starts at 6am.
* There are 300 blue days, 43 white days and 22 red days per tempo year.
* The number of days of each colour is fixed each tempo year.
* Sunday is always a blue day.
* Red days can not fall on a holiday, weekend or more than 5 weekdays in a row.

... despite the increased standing charge, electricity on blue days is by far the cheapest that you can get it, and during the cheap rate on a blue day the rate is extremely low.

On white days the rate is higher than either option HC or Base, but not by much. The bad news is that on red days the cost is ... prohibitively expensive ... Of course these days are usually the coldest of the winter.

The main draw back is that you don’t know what colour the next day is until 8pm the night before.

You have a display unit that plugs into any socket in your home that picks up a signal from the supply and so the unit displays the colour with a light, both for today and the next (from 8pm) ...

http://www.thisfrenchlife.com/thisfrenchlife/2004/11/electricity_tar.html